Date Night

Steve Carell and Tina Fey are Phil and Claire Foster, an average couple who never has time for anything particularly exciting in their lives any more.  In this movie, something "exciting" happens.

After learning that their friends, played by Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig, are getting a divorce, Phil and Claire try to spice up their own life in various ways, culminating with leaving their children with the sitter at their New Jersey home and venture into Manhattan to have dinner at an exclusive restaurant.  When they're denied a seat because they didn't have a reservation, Phil claims to be the Tripplehorns (later to be seen as James Franco and Mila Kunis), a couple who has not shown up. Things are working out fine until a couple of thugs (Common and Jimmi Simpson) show up looking for the Tripplehorns, thus launching a mistaken identity night of car chases and Mark Wahlberg's abs.  Ray Liotta, will.i.am, and Olivia Munn also appear.

This movie would have been a lot better if Phil and Claire from Modern Family had replaced Carell and Fey.  As funny as the two of them can be, I didn't see them as anything but Steve Carell and Tina Fey - their characters never came through and it felt more like an extended SNL skit with a big budget.  Half the jokes revolve around people being appalled that the couple took someone else's reservation and not being concerned about the fact that the mob and crooked cops are chasing a couple around the city.  The other half of the jokes were already in the trailers.

There were a couple chuckles here and there, but a comedy needs more than a couple of laughs.  It seems like the actors were having a lot of fun - off screen.  I get the feeling that there were a lot of inside jokes and out takes that made what they were doing and saying seem a lot funnier at the time, but none of that made it into the final cut.

Date Night is not funny and borders on tedious - sad to say.

** (2/5 stars)

Animal Crackers

Adapted from an earlier broadway musical by the same name, Animal Crackers, from 1930 is one of the many comedies filmed by the Marx Brothers.  The film stars the four of them - Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, and Zeppo Marx, as well as Lillian Roth and Margaret Dumont.

Groucho is Captain Spalding, returned from an African exploration, and entertains Mrs. Rittenhouse (Dumont) at a party with such classics as "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."  Zeppo is Spalding's assistant, Horatio Jamison.  Chico is Signor Emanuel Ravelli, who is apparently in charge of the music at the party, along with The Professor (Harpo).  Lillian Roth plays Mrs. Rittenhouse's niece.

The plot, as much as there is one, revolves around a valuable painting being unveiled at the party and various people stealing/swapping the painting for various reasons that don't always make sense.

I seem to remember the Marx brothers being funnier than this movie was.  Maybe it's just this particular movie, but most of Animal Crackers was just not funny.  It suffers from scenes going on for far too long, something which many comedies of the time seemed to.  I don't know if we just don't have the same attention span anymore or if comedic timing has just evolved successfully, or perhaps a bit of both.  I'm sure many of the jokes were much funnier for people alive in the 20's, but if you're not a history buff, they probably won't do it for ya.

The Marx Brothers had some smarter humour than, say, the Three Stooges, but that is their downfall as it dates them terribly.

**(2/5 stars)

From Paris with Love

From Paris with Love, (not to be confused with Paris je t'aime, the collection of short films) is a 2010 action film starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers  as a diplomatic assistant in France and part time CIA lackey who finally gets a taste of field action when he's asked to pick up the slightly off kilter agent Wax (a bald John Travolta).

From Paris with Love tries to be a comedic action spy thriller with political intrigue and liberal drug use.  Sure, it's got all those elements, but too many ingredients makes this pot of stew messy.  There a number of great lines or funny moments, but they get lost in a plot that is too often boring, confusing, or just pointless.  John Travolta's character is easily the best part of the movie and I wouldn't mind seeing a spin off just focusing on him and his non-kosher way of getting things done.

None of the other characters are memorable in any way, being pretty much generic, one dimensional bit parts, despite the fact that most of them have multiple facets.  How that was accomplished is beyond me.  I'm wracking my brain for anything else to say about this film but despite having seen it just a few days ago, it's already pretty much slipped my mind, which says more than I could write.

There's nothing horribly wrong about this movie, but it is completely and utterly forgettable in every way.  There were maybe four scenes worth seeing and half of them were already over emphasized in the trailers. 

Fans of Travolta, see it.  Everyone else, see it if you really have nothing better to do.  Like watching a better movie.

** (2/5 stars)

Volcano

I remember watching this on television many years back, but what I didn't remember until I found myself channel surfing on a slow night was that this campy disaster movie starred Tommy Lee Jones and Don Cheadle.  Volcano comes from 1997, around the same time as other disaster movies such as Asteroid, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Dante's Peak, Twister, Independence Day, and dozens of other lesser known one word natural disasters like Turbulence and Tornado!.  The '90s were apparently ripe with disaster.

Volcano takes the unlikely premise of a volcano erupting beneath LA and throws (then) state of the art special effects at it.  Mike Roark (Jones) is the head of OEM (Office of Emergency Management, not Original Equipment Manufacturer) and is supposed to be on vacation with his daughter (Gaby Hoffmann), leaving his associate (Cheadle) in charge.  When the city is awakened by a quake, however, the job quickly pulls him back in.  Everything seems more or less normal but, of course, it isn't.  Strange things seem to be happening beneath the surface and geologist Dr. Amy Barnes (Anne Heche) is the only one who has a clue about it.  Soon Mike is the only one smart and heroic enough to save the city from becoming the next Pompeii, while keeping his daughter safe by making impossible leaps over creeping molten lava.

Speaking of creeping molten lava, there is a lot of it.  And while the visual effects are actually not half bad, I think every shot of the magma's slow advance is the exact same piece of film, and it's really not that intimidating.  The overall effects are pretty good for the time though.  The lava flow and Tommy Lee Jones carry this entire movie on their shoulders, and since those are two pairs of decently strong shoulders, Volcano doesn't fall into a sink hole, rising to mediocre.  It's still campy as all get out though.  The acting is nothing extraordinary, but is not distracting, but there's only so much you can do about a premise as far fetched, yet straightforward as this one.  Something tells me that Roland Emmerich could have found many unlikely plot devices and devise some scenes even more spectacular than knocking over a skyscraper in the middle of the city had he helmed this movie, but that's not the case.

What we have is a watchable disaster drama with predictable outcomes, nearly flat characters, and pretty good eye candy for when it was made.  Don't go out of your way to see this one, but there is worse out there.

** (2/5 stars)

Brazil

Brazil, from 1985, comes from the strange British mind of Terry Gilliam.  It follows, then, that this film did wonderfully in the UK, poorly in the US, and has since developed a cult following.

Jonathan Pryce, who is probably most easily recognized as Governor Swan in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, is Sam Lowry, a low level employee of the Ministry of Information in a fictional dystopian parody of Britain.  Despite being more intelligent than most of the bureaucrats around him, Sam is happy to stay at his position where he is mostly ignored and not responsible for the problems of higher departments.  His life is thrown into a maelstrom, however, when he investigates some inconsistent paperwork that led to the arrest and death of a Mr. A. Buttle instead of suspected terrorist A. Tuttle (Robert De Niro) due to an error caused by a fly getting caught in a typewriter.  In the process, he meets the mysterious girl (Kim Greist) who populates his frequent fantasy daydreams and finds himself becoming entangled in some very dangerous red tape as he ends up on the run from a bureaucracy that thinks he is associated with nondescript terrorists.

No one likes to make fun of bureaucracy like the Brits, and this - along with a message against consumerism - are central themes in the slapstick 1984esque world of Brazil.  From his incompetent boss Bilbo Mr. Kurtzmann (Ian Holm) who spends most of his time figuring out ways that his problems are someone else's problems, to Lowry's plastic surgery addicted mother (Katherine Helmond), the whole movie is a satire of society.  It's too bad that it makes so very little sense.

There is something that resembles a plot but it feels more like Gilliam's stream of consciousness.  On one hand, it makes this film very interesting to watch since it's like being inside a crazy person's imagination, but on the flip side, it is hard to comprehend.  I can appreciate Brazil for being highly imaginative and probably brilliant in ways that British citizens of 1985 and fans of Terry Gilliam will understand.  There are parts that are genuinely interesting and/or funny and it is fascinating to see how computers are portrayed by a film maker at a time when computers were still a very new and uncommon thing.

This is probably a good movie if you like such things, but for me it is mostly incomprehensible in a bad way, which puts a damper on my enjoyment.  Oh, and it has nothing to do with Brazil.

** (2/5 stars)

The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones is the Peter Jackson film adaptation of Alice Sebold's 2002 novel of the same name.  The book received much critical praise and quickly became a best seller and it seemed that handing it over to one of the more accomplished directors of recent time could only produce something good.

Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan who needs to shake the curse of poorly adapted novels) is a vibrant 14 year old girl who is just starting to come into herself when she is lured away by her neighbor Mr Harvey (an unusually hairy Stanley Tucci) and brutally murdered.  After coming to grips with the fact that she is dead, Susie watches from her Heaven-like place as her family deals with her death and searches for her murderer.  Her father (Mark Wahlberg who is looking more and more like Kevin Bacon) tirelessly searches for any lead to find his daughter's killer causing him to lose touch with her mother (Rachel Weisz) who leaves in search of some sort of peace.  Her alcoholic grandmother (Susan Sarandon) arrives to take care of her younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) and little brother Buckley (Christian Thomas Ashdale).

For all the faults this movie exhibits, the worst is time management.  This is - in true Jackson spirit - a longer than average film.  The problem this time is that perhaps half of that time could have been cut without leaving anything out.  It takes over half an hour for the main point of the story to even occur, that is, Susie's death.  It's another thirty minutes or so before anything really happens in regards to anyone tracking down Harvey or even beginning to suspect him.  From reading the description of novel, it seems like the material was there to be a good story, but it just wasn't used very well.  One would think that with his experience with The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson would know how to respect source material without making many changes, but this is not the case.

Besides the length, even more drawn out by uses of ethereal slow motion, the story just doesn't make a whole lot of sense at times, being meaning-laden images that probably make sense to those who made them.  Susie's afterlife world is like something out of Dr. Parnassus's Imaginarium, only more hokey and less inspiring.  Also, as she finds her Heaven populated with only Harvey's other victims, one wonders how lonely other heavens must be for non-serial killer victims.  Little is explained in way of how or why Susie was killed and we are left to infer that Harvey was a creep of some kind.  Duh. 

Without giving much away, the ending is one of the less satisfying I have ever seen, and strangest.  The only thing we're left with is some kind of sense that Susie is happier now that she's dead, which seems an odd message.  The Lovely Bones was apparently a very good book.  What we're given here is a movie that changes the pacing, leaves out events, and sucks time down a slow drain with needless scenes.  There are some grand ideas and visuals, but none connect.

** (2/5 stars)

The Day the Earth Stood Still

I've still never seen the 1951 classic, but did finally get around to watching the more recent remake starring Keanu Reeves.

Klaatu (Reeves) is an alien sent to Earth, along with a deadly robot called G.O.R.T, to gather the verdict on whether or not the planet should be rescued from the human population and to exact judgment based on that verdict.  Instead of making contact with the humans who might actually discuss this situation, he is nearly killed by the military and taken into custody by a rather idiotic and pompous secretary of defense (Kathy Bates).  Luckily Dr. Benson (Jennifer Connelly) is there to defy her superiors because - well, I don't think a real reason was ever given, something about being compassionate and believing the alien from outer space when he said he needed to talk to someone who would listen.

Dr. Benson and her son (Jaden Smith) soon become fugitives as they drive Klaatu around through the woods, stopping randomly to get some sort of advice from some sort of mathematician or scientist played by John Cleese just because.


The original movie resonated with the audience with it's themes of peace and the improvement and hope of humanity.  This update shoehorns those sentiments into today's issues, throwing in a reference to Iraq for good measure.  Reeves nails the part of an emotionless alien to no big surprise.  None of the other actors were particularly memorable, though Smith shows that he has more than just his father's name.  Unfortunately his character is written in completely unbelievable way jumping back and forth from one emotion to another and generally not acting like a real person.

The special effects are, for the most part, eye candy, but the rest of the film is like a plain cracker - nothing to really sink your teeth into.  It doesn't really feel like much effort was put into making this movie.  Remakes can be good, but not this time.

** (2/5 stars)

Treasure Planet

I remember being disappointed in this movie when I first saw it way back in '03.  Being one of the few Disney movies my wife had not seen, however, we gave it another go round.  Sadly, my opinion only lessened.

Treasure Planet is - not surprisingly - a Disney retelling of Treasure Island but in space.  The film gets started with a young Jim Hawkins (Austin Majors, voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt for the rest of the movie) "reading" an ingenious holo-novel about the legendary Treasure Planet, narrated by the late, legendary, Tony Jay.  Fast forward to Jim's teen years and he's a precocious daredevil whose run-ins with the robocops distress his mother (Laurie Metcalf) who is trying to run a busy tavern by herself.  Their lives are sure to change, however, when Billy Bones (Patrick McGoohan) - here a giant snapping turtle creature - dies on their doorstep leaving a mysterious map.  Any more summary would be ridiculous as the movie follows the outline of Treasure Island nearly verbatim despite being set in another world.  A few changes were made that Disneyfied the story a bit like the fact that Jim is no longer an orphan and the ending was a bit happier.  Anyone who knows the story though will suffer from some unpleasant deja vu.

The artwork here is the best part of the movie.  At times it is inspired - a rich science fiction pallet with a steampunk influence.  At others it is absurd as goofy aliens fly aboard sailing ships in space.  It also can never make up it's mind as to what should be shown as 3D renderings and what shouldn't.  The characters all feel pretty recycled as nearly each one not only is a reflection of the Robert Louis Stevenson characters, but has the skeleton and voice of some other Disney character.  From the female feline captain of the "RLS Legacy" (Emma Thompson) and her first mate Arrow (Roscoe Lee Browne) to the cyborg cook John Silver ((Brian Murray) it all feels tired and done before.  Even David Hyde Pierce as Jim's excitable canine-esque companion (oh look everybody, a cat character and a dog character!) and Martin Short as B.E.N the android can't put an original spin on these characters that should be able to be so.

This adaptation had so much potential but fell about as flat as it could.  If you want a good retelling of this classic yarn, try Muppet Treasure Island instead.

** (2/5 stars)

Primer

Primer is brilliant and you won't understand it.  Primer is written, directed, and produced by Shane Carruth, a mathematician and engineer - and it shows.  A tale of time travel, Primer explains away the impossible not with the pseudo science mumbo jumbo that makes sense to the viewer but not in real life, but real science mumbo jumbo that probably makes a whole lot of sense, but only if you have a PhD in quantum mechanics.

Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) are two garage start-up engineers trying to make it big.  While trying to create some sort of anti-gravity device they accidentally find themselves in the possession of a device that allows time travel in such a complicated way that wikipedia has a detailed diagram to try to explain it.

Like anyone should expect, using the device proves to have all sorts of implications.  In the name of realism, these implications are so complex that I'm not sure I understand half of them.  Realism is the name of the game here, despite the unrealistic subject of the film.  I could completely believe that Aaron and Abe were actually two geeks trying to be the next Woz and that they knew exactly what they were talking about every time they opened their mouths to say something I didn't understand.  The small budget ($7,000) incidentally did not cause the film to suffer.  The low quality film style lent itself quite well to the realism as if there was a hidden person filming a documentary.

On one hand I applaud Carruth for crafting such an insanely complicated piece of work that I'm sure makes sense if you are capable of understanding it.  He refused to water down anything for the sake of the uneducated, and that's something I wish we saw at least a little more of in some mainstream movies.  On the other hand, however, it is very hard to enjoy a movie you can't understand and follow, even if you know you should appreciate it for the Einstein caliber masterpiece it surely is.  I know there are those who will point out that this is a smart film that moves far beyond the schlock that is most mainstream films.  I can't however, in good conscience, recommend this to anyone who does not list visiting the Large Hadron Collider among their life long goals.

** (2/5 stars)

The Hangover

I don't tend to like a lot of today's comedies, so I steer clear of them most of the time.  I had heard from too many people, though, that The Hangover was pretty much the funniest thing ever so I gave it a shot.  If only to serve as a barometer for what people today think is funny.

The premise of The Hangover is simple enough.  Three guys, Phil(Bradley Cooper), Stu(Ed Helms), and Alan(Zach Galifianakis) take their buddy Doug (Justin Bartha) to Vegas for the most awesome bachelor party they can muster just days before the big one.  Not all goes as planned, however, and the three of them wake the next morning with little to no recollection of the night before and no idea where the groom-to-be is.  They proceed on a madcap detective adventure, trying to piece together the night before and find Doug before his wedding passes by with him still a bachelor.

The three of them use clues like a missing tooth, a hospital bracelet, and a baby left in their hotel room to retrace their steps.  The more they uncover, the more it becomes apparent just how crazy their night was.  It may have been one crazy night, but I was left waiting for the stupid crazy to become funny.  Being a comedy, it did have it's funny parts - most of which are in the (much more entertaining) trailers.  And I still haven't figured out why it's funny to see a bunch of ugly guys' cheeks and dongles if you will.  Galifianakis can't seem to keep his pants on for the life of him.

It is nice to find out that someone other than Judd Apatow is making comedies these days, but when Apatow recycled characters come out on top, you know you have a problem.  The mystery angle was interesting enough to keep me wondering what happened, though just barely.  Besides, hasn't it been done before?

Maybe I have to be able to relate to the protagonists to find it funny, but frankly I'm glad I can't relate to being so trashed out of my mind that I can't remember why there's a live tiger in my hotel bathroom and I'm a little worried if everyone who found it so hilarious can.

The movie ends with some sort of half-assed effort to provide a moral to the story.  Something about not getting married to a horrible person just because you might as well.  Ok.  Seriously the best part of this movie was realizing that Bradley Cooper is going to be great as the smooth talking Face in the upcomong A-Team.  I was tempted to give this one star, but there was some originality involved, and clearly a lot of effort put into this movie so I'll let it slide comfortably into one slot above the Star Wars abomination that makes Jar-Jar look like the work of Orson Welles.

If you like your comedies with plenty of ugly naked men, abusive baby jokes, an increasingly stupid plot and a character whose only purpose is to screw things up while making no sense every time he opens his mouth, by all means, check this one out in a hurry.

** (2/5 stars)

The Invention of Lying

This movie was certainly not what I expected.  The basic concept begins "in a world" where no one lies and no one even understands the concept of "saying something that isn't."  Not only that, but everyone is brutally honest, saying whatever is on their mind, whether they were asked or not.  This is a world of dreary, bored people that are more often than not depressed.  There is also a distinct line drawn between "losers" and more successful people since apparently the only way a loser could become something more would be to lie about themselves.

British funny man, Ricky Gervais, stars in this distinctly English flavored romantic satire dramedy and also penned the screen play.  The story begins with Mark (Gervais) going out on a date with painfully out of his league Anna (Jennifer Garner).  Due to the nature of the world they live in, both know that the date is going nowhere before it even starts, but they proceed for the sake of it.  Though she admits to having a better time than she expected, Anna could never be with a loser like Mark and that seems to be the end of that.  Following that depressing scenario, Mark soon loses his job as a screenwriter due to the fact that his assigned material is not interesting enough since movies are simply someone recounting historical facts in a world where nothing is made up.  Jobless and broke, Mark faces eviction.  At the bank, getting ready to withdraw his last few hundred dollars, something somehow clicks and he simply tells the teller he has more money than he really does.  Not realizing it is possible to say something that isn't, she apologizes for the error and hands over the cash.  Mark suddenly finds himself in possession of a great power that allows him to do anything or anyone he wants by simply opening his mouth.

For Mark, lying produces pretty much nothing but good as he becomes rich and famous, and makes other people happy by telling them what they want to hear, regardless of truth.  He catapults through the rest of the plot, aided by a plethora of cameo characters from Tina Fey to Edward Norton (genius) and Jonah Hill to Christopher Guest.  Of course, what he really wants is Anna, but that's only to make this seem like a romantic comedy.  What this movie really is, is a satire surrounding what happens when Mark accidentally invents religion.

Normally I enjoy a good satire, but this one left a bad taste in my mouth despite the somewhat clever flavoring reminiscent of the late great Douglas Adams.  Maybe it had to do with the moral of the story being "lying is good" and "religion is probably just a lie someone told to make someone else feel better and it got a bit out of hand."  It had so much potential but ended up as a cheap shot at mocking Christianity while masquerading as a clever satire that was masquerading as a romantic comedy.  A good satire doesn't just make fun - it makes valid points, and I don't feel that this made many at all.

There were some parts I enjoyed, and even the irreverent comedy was done in that classy way that only the Brits can seem to pull off, but really, it felt like I was just watching something that was coming up with as many ways as possible to tell me I'm stupid for believing in God and/or bothering to worry about whether or not I'm telling the truth, and that made even the clever and funny parts less enjoyable.  I realize it's just a movie with a somewhat cheeky point of view, but that point of view still made it harder to enjoy.  If you want my rating of this based purely on technical merit as a movie, without my personal feelings involved you can add one star to my rating, but really, there are so many better movies.

**(2/5 stars)

Extract

Between the two blizzards of 2010 keeping Netflix from my door and then not writing this review immediately, it has been a little while since I got a review up, but I'm not sure it was worth the wait.

I'm a big fan of Mike Judge's other forays onto the big screen - Office Space and Idiocracy - and so I was looking forward to the next in his vein of "funny because they're true, but still ridiculous enough to make good entertainment" movies.  They're movies in which things that happen feel like they could actually happen, unlike the world in which Apatow lives.

Extract stars Jason Bateman, perhaps best known for his role on Arrested Development, as Joel Reynolds, owner of an extract plant.  Not only must he deal with unruly employees and the general stress of running a business, he hasn't had any extra curricular activities with his wife (Kristen Wiig of SNL) for quite some time and has the world's most annoying neighbor on top of that.  His drinking buddy, a long haired Ben Affleck, comes up with a solution to his marital problems that involves having an affair with the new employee (Mila Kunis) and seemed like a good idea at the time.  Mostly because at the time, the odd effects of horse tranquilizers were involved.  Things for Joel just go downhill from there.

I was expecting hilarity, but was somewhat disappointed.  Parts of this movie were funny, but it never really felt cohesive.  It was more like a sketch comedy that failed in linking the sketches into the bigger picture they were supposed to be.  There were certain parts that were gold, like the factory line women who would refuse to turn off the line when it got backed up because "why should they do their job when other people obviously weren't doing theirs?"  I think we all know at least one person like that.  Much of it, though, was just above forgettable.  Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, since it wasn't a "bad" movie, per se, but Judge is capable of so much better.

** (2/5 stars)

Public Enemies

With a pairing like Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, how could this film be anything short of awesome?  The fact that it is based on the true life tale of FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Bale) and how he tracked down infamous modern day Robin Hood gangster, John Dillinger (Depp) seems just an added bonus.  No, that was a legitimate question, not a statement.  How could a lineup like that fall so completely short?

Despite the promising setup, Public Enemies was, in my opinion, boring.  Plain and simple.  I kept telling myself that it was a portrayal of a fascinating group of characters in a fascinating time period and that I should be finding this interesting, but I didn't.  The movie was either predictable or disjointed the entire time.  I know that Dillinger had something of a short criminal career, the bulk of the "interesting stuff" took place over the course of a year - which seems a reasonable time frame for a movie to work with.  That year, for all I could tell while watching the movie, took place over the course of maybe a week or two as people in his life were imploded into one another, along with the days, creating a jerky, rushed, story that was probably about as accurate to the real events as Disney's Pocahontas.  (Wow, was that really fifteen years ago already?). 

Bale's performance was nothing special, though not unpleasent.  Depp's classy portrayal of the infamous character was probably the only enjoyable things about this movie.  Other than that, the only thing that really stood out was how odd the camera work was, moving around and zooming in somewhat randomly in a style that much better suited Cloverfield.

Between the rushed, confusing story, the boring portrayal of what must have been an exciting piece of history - or at least that could have been entertainingly presented as such - a police force that was shown as laughably idiotic, I enjoyed this movie only slightly more than going about some daily chore that I don't really mind doing.  I didn't hate it, but I don't feel I could ever reccomend it to anyone in good conscience when there are so many much better movies out there.

** (2/5 stars)