Tag: review

The Monuments Men tries too hard to be an important type film. It was once scheduled for a Christmas season release, a time for Oscar prestige openings. But then it was moved back a few weeks into the current year, and we find it still playing to an audience of elderly on a Saturday afternoon.

The movie tells the tales of the Army men who were tasked to save the treasures of Europe from the Nazis. Ordinary men of arts were gathered together and sent to the front to stop the pillaging of the great arts of Europe. Art restorers, architects, painters, and sculptors were recruited. They made up a small team that poked around the front lines in the latter part of the war finding and guarding important art.

It was a perfectly adequate film for a Saturday afternoon.

3 of 5 stars

I went into Pompeii hoping that Paul WS Anderson would produce a good bad movie like his The Three Musketeers. Unfortunately, it was a terrible, terrible movie. From Kit Harrington, the leading man trying to be Orlando Bloom channeling Erica Bana, to Emily Browning, the romantic interest not filling the Mila Jovovich role, this movie missed on all cylinders. It was derivative of Titanic and Gladiator, and it didn’t try to hide that fact.

Pompeii plot is about the last days of the city under threat of Mount Vesuvius. Browning plays the daughter of the chief merchant of the city. She has just returned from Rome sickened by the political machinations. She’s come home to find that her Senator suitor, Kiefer Sutherland and a weird accent, holds the fate of her father’s ambitions in his hands. Harrington is a slave and gladiator, brought to Pompeii for the big festival. He was a member of a Celtic tribe slaughterd by Sutherland. He’s come for his revenge. He’s joined in his quest by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje playing the Djimon Hounsou from Gladiator. His arch is exactly the same. He’s Harrington’s nemesis first, then friend afterwards. This all happens under the threat of the volcano.

The acting was bad. The story and plot movements were bad. Keifer Sutherland was bad. I wish I had something good to say, but don’t watch this ever.

1 of 5 stars.

August: Osage County is not a movie I would go see, but my mom wanted to catch it. It’s a film adapted from a stage play. It too got an Oscar nod for its actresses namely, Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. I’m not one to judge acting, but I thought that Streep was overboard. I think she got the nod, because she’s Meryl Streep. There’s got to have been more subtle acting to have gotten the nod. I think it would be better.

Anyway, the film is about Streep as matriarch of a family looking to escape from each other. She’s got cancer. Her husband gets her help then goes and drowns. The family, all daughters, gets together to bury him. The gloves come off. They bicker — mother-daughter, sister-sister.

It’s a story about family history. You leave, you love, you come back. You know it all hurts. Especially, if your mother is as demanding as Streep was. Or as big a drug addict.

It’s an interesting film for a Saturday afternoon. It’s not something I want to catch again. It was adequate.

3 of 5 stars.

American Hustle is all about the 70s look. Amy Adams’s plunging neck lines, Jennifer Lawrences’s hair, Bradley Cooper’s perm. You’ll be too busy being amazed by the costume design to really appreciate the film.

American Hustle purports to tell the tale of the ABSCAM scandal in the late 70s. It was an FBI scam to trick congressman and senators into accepting bribes to make a fake Arab sheik an American citizen.

Amy Adams and Christian Bale play the original con men caught by the FBI and ordered to run the scam. They were small time players, but Bradley Cooper’s ambitious FBI agent wants to make a name for himself by going after big fish. The big fish was a Jeremy Renner’s simple Jersey mayor looking to help his constituents. He wanted to bring jobs back to Atlantic City helping people — a good guy? Cooper, a good guy? Bale and Adams good people? Jennifer Lawrence, Bale’s wife, not so good as she plays a loud, no class girl who when she finds out about the scam tries to needle her way into the action and when she gets blocked out takes it upon herself to destroy everything.

I think Bale did a fine job at portraying a small time hustler caught in a too large scam hustling his way out of the jam. Cooper was good as well playing the FBI agent looking to go big time. He was out of control. The girls, Adams and Lawrence, did well too with Adams and her cleavage edging out Lawrences’s Jersey girl nonsense in the heart of this viewer.

This movie is a Golden Globe nominee for best comedy. While there was a lot to laugh at, I don’t think this started out as comedy. It’s just that the con men got themselves into laughable situations. This isn’t an Adam Sandler film. The funniest part is ‘science oven’ — you burned the science oven!

It’s a good flick. Maybe better than the rating I’m giving it.

3 of 5 stars.

47 Ronin is a mess. It’s a movie based on a traditional Japanese tale of loyalty and revenge plus magic, dragons, and Keanu.

The Japanese tale was about samurai whose lord had to kill himself for disparaging another. His samurai, now leaderless ronin, vowed revenge because they thought that the offense was not severe. The 47 ronin of the title plotted for years eventually exacting revenge on their target. The Emperor liked the way the ronin conducted themselves and allowed the ronin to have an honorable ending. They all died in the end.

This version adds in Keanu as a mystically half-breed. Yeah, it makes no difference, but they needed him so that they can add the magic, the dragons, and the vile witch.

Everything has to be epic in Hollywood. That’s why there was the magic, the dragons, and the vile witch. Hollywood must make everything ginormous. Unfortunately, not everything needs the ginormity. The original 47 ronin story has all you need. It’s withstood years and years of telling in Japan. It may withstand the magic, the dragons, and the vile witch, but it isn’t that good of tale with it.

3 of 5 stars.

The latest film version of Thurber’s short story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, has nothing in common with the written word. It may have day dream sequences, but they are not like the ones in the story. Then after a bit, the day dreams go away and we are left with another movie whose sole purpose is to utter the banal line, “carpe diem.”

Yes, we know.

Walter Mitty is the analog curator at Life magazine as it transitions to the digital age of online internet. He receives the quintessence of Life magazine in a film negative, but loses it because he lacks reading comprehension or doesn’t put money in his wallet.

He also wants to flirt with a girl at work. He does say hi and they do start connecting and then you wonder how they did connect.

I wish this was a better movie, but it wasn’t. It was Ben Stiller putting on his indie director mood similar to how he became Simple Jack. Lots of weirdness. Could’ve been funnier. May become another hit on Comedy Central.

3 of 5 stars.

Frozen, the latest Disney animated film and not how I feel in the morning as I get into my car. Perhaps I’m not the right audience for the film, because it didn’t impress me like it did the many, many movie-goers who made it tops at the box office this past weekend. I guess I’m not a 10 year old girl or have the soul of a kid because I actually didn’t know what was so special — I mean, come on, it’s Tangled in the snow.

Frozen features 2 princesses of an unnamed northern European city-state. When they were young, the eldest exhibited Iceman-like powers and hurt her younger sister. She’s was told to suppress them so as she gets older she doesn’t know how to control them. When it came time for her to ascend to the throne, the sisters get into a fight which plunges the city-state into a deep winter. The princesses must make up, the queen rein in her power and be regal, and the younger princess must reconcile and help heal the rift between the two.

And there was a magical snowman, a puppy-like reindeer, and an oaf. There was also villains.

This could’ve been something neat if more of the relationship between the sisters was explored. If it tried to deal with the princesses like Pixar’s Brave did. The conflict seemed too superficial.

There was also way too much singing.

3 of 5 stars.