Tag: review

As I read the series, this book was my favorite until the latest. It gets away from the schooling and more into the fighting. The film version does the same.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the series’s Empire Strikes Back. While sitting through it you are somewhat shocked at all that is going on. Maybe too much story is being told. The book was around 900 pages so the job by Michael Goldenberg condensing it was amazing. It’s dark, fitting in with the mood of Harry Potter who knows what death is and who will taste its bitterness yet again. Faced to face with Voldemort and with the wizarding community not believing it, a challenge is put upon the boy who lived to unmask Voldemort’s lies and show wizarding world that he really is back.

Like The Empire Strikes Back, this story is at the middle of the tale. In a normal action movie, this is about where the action team kicks start their program to getting ready to kick ass. Bad to the Bone should’ve been playing as Dumbledore’s Army assembles and practices their charms, hexes and spells. Expelliarmus!

And like Empire it was moody. Too much so that it was hard to believe the audience enjoyed it. They left in silence. Yet, as the book finishes and the films are done, we’ll look back at this film and see how good a movie it was. We’ll appreciate it much more in the context of the whole. It brings us to the beginning of the end. The stakes are raised and witches and muggles will die, but Harry Potter will stand tall with his friends. They’re what helps him in the end.

4 of 5 stars.

PS. Saw this at the out of the way place of Towson Commons 12. More adults than kids in the audience. Or rather the adults were just as awed as if they were 12 years old again.

At yesterday’s party, people wondered why I wasn’t blogging more since I got my iPhone. It’s awesomeness not withstanding, I don’t like to do it from the smallish keyoard. But to get back on the daily blogging track, I guess I should post my review of Ratatouille, which is only two weeks late.

At the end of the movie, I turned to The Seed and said that Pixar has a problem. Now it’s not the quality of the movie, but a marketing one. It’s a very good movie, but to market it as a fun ride for kids is selling it short.

Ratatouille centers around Remy the rat that has an uncanny sense of smell which leads him to wanting to cook. He makes it to Paris and the kitchen of Gusteau’s a former 5 star restaurant trying to get its reputation back. With the help of the dishwasher, Remy, brings back the gusto to Gusteau’s.

It’s an amazingly solid story with ebbs and flows that arise naturally. Nothing seems to have been added haphazardly. Like a good dish! It’s very mature story. One that would be hard to keep the young kids in line to watch. Maybe the animation will hold their interest, but after awhile the themes of the movie will go over the young one’s head and he’ll want to go eat some fried chicken fingers.

One thing about watching rats in the kitchen, it makes you want to puke. The advances in CG turned some of the shots of the rat warren rather disconcerting. It’s a cartoon but it looks so real. Gross.

In the end, this is another Pixar homerun. It’s made Brad Bird a very famous director who imbues stories with humanity. It’s rumored that he’s going to direct a live action film. It’s too bad, because he’s shown that the animated film can bring about some good storytelling.

4 of 5 stars.

Transformers. I’m posting this review out of order because The Seed has a neat little review. In it, he hesitates to give it a 4 star rating. I’m much the same way.

For the first hour, I was completely enthralled enjoying the thrill ride that Michael Bay created. It was completely fun. The audience was into it as well. Holy Moses, they cheered for the trailers! I don’t know if it was nostalgia or what but I was getting into it. The story was really flimsy and makes no sense. In fact, it’s rather stupid, but I wasn’t going to let that distract me.

The story starts in the beginning with an cube (energon?), which on a distant planet had the autobots and decepticons fighting over for supreme rulership. It flew to earth where it has been for thousands of years waiting for Col. Witwicky to find it. Needless to say his descendants have to protect it from falling into Megatrons hands. Fighting ensues.

See. Stupid.

But the first hour was still fun. Even though it had to set up the plot, I got into it. I think Michael Bay learned a lesson from his last few outings. Ditch the gravitas and have fun. It reminded me of Bad Boys. And that girl was a Tea Leoni clone. Lots of running. Some of the action sequences was very hard to understand what was going on as if they knew the CG was going to look like shit so make the robots nothing but a blur of metal. If only we had gotten better views of the fight.

Then, the movie fell into a rote action flick once Optimus Prime showed up. It bogged down in the middle especially a scene involving hiding these huge robots from the parents. And it slowly became boring. With the action scenes hard to understand, it also slightly became frustrating. I wanted to see robots bashing robots, but I saw streaks. Streaks!

This movie will make bank judging from the audience reaction. It will spawn a sequel. Don’t let that get in the way of enjoying it now.

3 of 5 stars. Could’ve been 4 if it didn’t get slow.

John Rodgers is credited with some of the story. He also wrote Catwoman. He blogs at Kung Fu Monkey. Read him.

Hmm. I’ll take what’s behind door number two, Alex.

The summer of ponderous sequels continues with the latest Bruce Willis Die Hard, Live Free or Die Hard. In it, we have a simple everyday beat cop trying to stop the next terrorist threat, but only finding that it was a bank heist. In this version, the terrorist is the former counter-cyberterrorist computing czar and the bank he heists is all of them. With so much problems in the world, why does it end up being a smash and grab?

As I sat through this movie, I couldn’t help feeling that it didn’t matter if this was a Bruce Willis Die Hard film, because the story and situation was too generic that even Steven Seagal’s Casey Ryback could’ve handled this one. And now that I remember it, he was in the exact same situation in Under Siege 2! It’s a rip off. I would’ve liked to have seen Seagal snap that dude’s knee backwards, though.

The stunts were spectacular. The CGI was barely noticeable, and the explosions were pretty good. At least you knew Bruce Willis was getting pummeled and getting hurt. The only thing phony is that the east coast namely DC doesn’t have elevated highways that spiral to nowhere. And Baltimore doesn’t look anything like DC.

2 of 5 stars.

You may wonder if 1408 is Steven King revisiting his seminal work, The Shining. In a ways it is. Creepy hotel. Creepy hotel workers. A writer loosing his mind or is he? All themes and signs that King has worked into his writing throughout his career. If I told you that 1408 was nothing more than a cheap imitation of The Shining, would it surprise you when I told you it isn’t? Perhaps not, but you can still guess all the plot threads in this film.

John Cusack is an unheralded writer in the throes of finishing out his career as the go to guy for ghost hunter guides. He debunks supposedly haunted places. Out of the blue, he receives a card not to spend a night in the titular room of the Dolphin Hotel in New York. After researching it, he has to find out why he shouldn’t and visits anyway. He spends the night in the hotel room. Does he get scared out of his mind? He goes crazy for the hour. And the ghosts and the room get to him.

I read a lot of ghost stories in my time. I can imagine this one as a story rather than a movie. It would seem to have fit in with the later day stories. Not the Victorian ghost stories that I dearly love. They all have a sceptic who falls into a frightening place, and eventually comes to believe in the supernatural.

This movie had some scares. I am glad for it. Because of the prevalence of the new wave of slasher/torture pics coming, the horror genre didn’t seem to be for fun. The movies have been given to being about the violence. Like pulling the wings off a fly for the sake of being sadistic. 1408 was a throw back to just plain atmospheric creeps. No cutting throats or half-sawn faces. Just trying to say, “BOO.”

BOO!

It won’t scare you, but it will on occasion make you have goosebumps. And that’s good enough for me.

3 of 5 stars.

Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer.

The first one was boring, but given that it has to establish the characters, their relationships, and the milieu they’ll be functioning in, it can be slightly forgiven for being too expository. Slightly. But I’m not the one to accept it. The first one was listless and the plot stank.

Sequels should be much better. There’s no longer a need to establish the situation. They should hit the ground running and therefore they should generally be a rocking good time.

This one wasn’t. It retained the boring, listless atmosphere of the first one. It also makes the mistake of making the Silver Surfer into the most boring of characters. I mean, come on, the Cosmic Force. What happened? Also, Galactus as a cloud was plain stupid. That was really the reason why I wanted to see it. I was interested in who would be playing Galactus. I was hoping for Bruce Willis, but a cloud of smoke. It seems that Lost’s smoke monster has got a really good agent. Coming soon to the multiplex near you smoke monster in Dukes of Hazard 3!

Jessica Alba with blue eyes is extremely disturbing to look at. She should not act anymore. She should just be a Maxim girl. The dude who played Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, was struggling to put on brave face. The show must go on.

The problem with the Fantastic Four franchise is that the writers and director do not believe in the comic book. They seem to have abandoned the stories of the comic for something not quite like it. A fake and a no good facsimile of the Fantastic Four just plain sucks.

2 of 5 stars.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

What can be said about this third installment? It’s a bloated, disjointed movie. I couldn’t keep up with the various double crosses throughout the movie. Who was backstabbing whom? I don’t know nor do I care. It left me pondering what happened to the fun and exciting pirates of the first movie. Then it left me deducing that hoboes are the new pirates and the old pirates are just world weary sailors.

I can’t wait for Hoboes of the Railyards: The Black Pearl.

2 of 5 stars.

Ocean’s 13 is another of the dreaded third installment of a trilogy that seem to have infected the movie theatres this summer. In this one, Danny Ocean and his band of con-men have come back to Vegas to avenge the honor of one of their own who was put into the hospital after a deal had gone sour. By coming back to Vegas, the story arc has come full circle. It tries to capture the magic from the first Ocean’s movie, but it fails to be as inspired as that one.

The key to these films is to know that they all have fun happens. And this one didn’t have much fun. I think it was because of the lack of Bernie Mac and too much of Matt Damon. Did you notice that he’s the one who fools around with the girl? So the first had George Clooney, Brad Pitt the second, and this one Matt Damon’s turn. Plus, he doesn’t get the girl in the end. Ellen Barkin’s character was used for laughs. She was treated very respectfully and in a film with guys you needed a girl for some balance. They should’ve hit her on the head or punched her in the face. With the way they treated her it wouldn’t have seemed out of place.

Anyway, this installment was just so-so. Neither exciting like the first or embarrassing like the second. It just went along, to make it’s money.

3 of 5 stars