Tag: review

I’m not too sure about Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. I enjoyed it while watching it, but soon after I felt terrible that I enjoyed it. In fact, I feel that it is a vulgar film. It asks us to try and make sense of these idiots who try a “Fargo,” kidnapping for money or to get their kidnappee’s estates. You can’t. Floridians are idiots — white Floridians especially.

Pain & Gain follows Marky Mark and his gym rat crew as they kidnap people who they try to blackmail them out of their own homes. They bumble their way through the first one successfully. Yet, they need more money, do it again, and cause all sorts of mayhem. Needless to say, they were unsuccessful. When things went wrong, they went wrong quickly and ugly.

The movie was a comedy yet it was somewhat of a thriller. You’ll laugh at the dummies and cringe at their dumb antics. Michael Bay makes you forget that it is a Michael Bay film. The only hint is that he spins the 360 shot in an important and crucial scene. It’s a Michael Bay special.

One good thing about the movie is The Rock. He’s pretty awesome and it shows. He’s very natural and easy going even when he’s doped up on cocaine. The Rock is so lovable.

You better watch this before the summer movie train’s in full speed. It will be soon gone and on digital download.

3 of 5 stars.

Tom Cruise once again tackles science fiction in Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion. Kosinski is the director of the notorious Tron: Legacy. Tron: Legacy was a movie I looked forward to, but afterwards, I wanted to burn my Mac mini. It was stupendously boring and superficial. Looks pretty like Olivia Wilde, but ultimately looks were deceiving. So would Oblivion be the same?

I digress. We were supposed to be talking about Oblivion, Tom Cruise, and the director, Kosinski.

Oblivion was written by Kosinski from one of his stories that became a comic book. I can see the comic book panels now and understand the langorious pace several issues would combine to match the first hour and a half of the movie. There was lots of mood setting placing Tom Cruise into the barren, post-alien apocalypse Earth. It took a while before we get into the meat of the story. Tom Cruise must save the remnants of the post-alien apocalypse Earth from the alien invaders. Or was is it the other way around? I should’ve put spoiler alert there. Or are you now keen on one of the many twists! Spoiler Alert!

Tom Cruise was Tom Cruise. Shirtless. Looks the same as he did years ago. Wears the same Yankees cap from the other alien invasion film: The War of the Worlds. He’s the star. Show him as much as possible. And don’t forget to have him running, running, running. Letting those little legs carry him as far and as fast as they can.

The thing most fascinating about Oblivion is that the it started to make sense once the movie began unraveling its mysteries. Things that felt like coincidence where actually explained. Of course, YMMV depending on if you buy the premise of the world Kosinski built. Early on I was not buying it; but the reveals made it worth while.

Oblivion was a lot better than Tron: Legacy. It had some of the same problems though: superficial, pretty, but it definitely made up for it with the twist and turns.

3 of 5 stars.

Admission suffers the same issues as Burt Wonderstone. It’s all over the place. Is it a romantic comedy featuring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd? Is it a stab at social commetary a la Mean Girls? Is it another movie? Yes. Yes. Yes. The problem was it was marketed as a romantic comedy at first and that social commentayr comedy second. But there is also another movie there about Tina Fey’s character and her long gone son given up for adoption. If you had told me there was this movie, I would not wonder what the movie was about. It was made into 3 movies by the creators of the film and all seemed fine. They didn’t sell it that way and that made it feel lousy. The movie deserved better, because it’s better as a whole.

3 of 5 stars.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is a mess. It’s like a lame magic trick. You know its bad. You feel terrible watching it. And yet you keep watching hoping that there will be magic soon. The magic never appears and all you have is fake. Bad magic means a bad movie.

The mess is because the movie doesn’t know what to tone to take with the magic. Should it laugh at the practitioners? It did sometimes, but other times their earnestness came through. Olivia Wilde’s character, sadly misused, wanted to be a magician when she grew up. Same with the leads, Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi. Should it treat magic with ironic detachment similar to Blades of Glory? Maybe. It made fun of it and took magic seriously.

The major problem was Burt Wonderstone became a dick as an adult. He took to magic because when he was young because he was friendless and bullied. Yet, when we meet him as an adult he was jaded from the magic. I could not believe that change in him. He needed to find the magic again. Which was another part of the story.

Again, the movie was all over the place. Not very good. And that’s bad magic.

2 of 5 stars.

Snuck in a movie this weekend. I had almost forgotten. Identity Thief really is that forgettable. It’s like popcorn – light and forgotten. Funny parts and yet plenty of stupid moments.

Melissa McCarthy is a funny gal. She can do physical comedy like no one else. Jason Bateman is her perfect straight man. Together they brought some heart to the film. They complimented each other well.

Unfortunately, the film was rather flat. In an alternate time, it may have been a different movie. Their was two plot threads that came from this alternate universe. The first was a skip tracer chasing after McCarthy’s thief. The second was the Cuban mob after McCarthy. Why either of these were in the film only the original screen writer knows.

The rest of the story outside of these characters was rather nice. Surprising. It also had a heart which you could not see coming from some comedy.

Then you leave the theatre and almost forgot you watched it. We’ll be seeing this on FX soon.

3 of 5 stars.

Django Unchained is Quenton Tarantino’s spaghetti western. In a similar vien as Sergio Leone’s “Man with no name” trilogy, it follows bounty hunters, or as the English translation called them bounty killers. One bounty killer frees the slave, Django, and they go looking for more bounties. After they collect their bounty, they go after Django’s wife in Candieland.

I feel that this one is not as good as Inglorious Basterds. It was not as thrilling. Yet, in some scenes it would get good.

Overall, I don’t think this matches Leone’s spaghetti westerns. It’s just something different.

3 of 5 stars

The Impossible is a true story of a family’s survival of the Southeast Asian Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004. The family scattered from the tsunami have to handle the havoc afterwards. That’s when the mother, seriously injured, had to undergo surgery while her kid sits and waits.

This film had the best CG effects I’ve ever seen. I could not believe that they were not in a tsunami. It was good and horrific.

3 of 5 stars.

You know I’ve had problems with Judd Apatow in regards to the length of his movies. They always feel 45 minutes too long. This Is 40 is no exception. You sit there and watch, the plot sort of rambles on and on about married white people’s problems, and you say, “This is a long movie.” IMDb lists the run time at 134 minutes, 2 hours and 14 minutes. Again, I say that comedies should be about 100 to 115 minutes long — laugh hard, laugh for a short time, then get out. Judd Apatow likes to go on and on. Shorten it, good sir, and you just may have something.

This Is 40 focuses on a married couple whose two birthdays occur in December. The wife believes she’s still a young bird. The husband is still a kid but with kids; acting like a kid acting like an adult. They have adult problems: difficult kids, difficult parents, marriage issues, money issues. Everything white people have. Also, most other people. This is forty for real.

The plot meanders quite a bit. Felt a little bit like a french nouvelle vague. One scene to another connected by the slightest thread of following this couple through their birthdays. Sprinkled in is handling the kids, and the parents, and the jobs. It’s just too real. Now there were chuckles to be had, but no guffaws. It’s a serious comedic meditation of getting older. I think we’re not ready for that just yet.

I already know about 40. Mine is different. Would it be the same with a wife and kids? It may be more hilarious.

3 of 5 stars.

The Guilt Trip is the kind of movie you watch with your mom on a lazy Saturday afternoon. It’s not offensive or embarrassing. It is an affirmation that we all love our mom no matter how crazy she makes us.

3 of 5 stars.