Tag: review

Brokeback Mountain for gen z.

Maybe I’m too old, but it was raunchy.

McLovin was the best. His screen time always had me laughing.

Keeping along the lines of my criticism of Judd Apatow related flicks: this was 10 minutes too long.

It may also be this generation’s Dazed and Confused or American Grafitti. One night looking for love. More likely this generation’s Can’t Hardly Wait!

3 of 5 stars.

In story telling there is a classic theory that every story has three parts, a beginning, a middle and an end. The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum constitute the trilogy about Jason Bourne. Yet, it seems after watching the final installment to be better off as a two-parter.

In the finale, Jason Bourne’s story picks up soon after the second. He hurriedly flees Moscow. While evading the Russian police, he fixes his wounds which leads him to recover even more memories from Treadstone. These memories makes him ultimately want to end it all, so he plans to find out why he is who he is to restore himself once again. The trail starts in London where he meets up with a journalist who just unraveled the secret CIA program that Treadstone is a part of. Of course, the journalist is a goner. Then the trail leads to Madrid to a former director who has intimate knowledge of the who and the why of Jason Bourne and Treadstone. He’s a goner, too. Bourne meets up with Nicki who should’ve asked for a desk job in Langley and they jaunt to Tangiers. In a thrilling scene, Bourne chases another CIA op from the rooftops of the city to save Nicki. This is why it’s so good. Eventually, we end up in NYC to the final scene of the second movie, and continue again for another final chase.

And that’s my problem with this installment. The first two had tied together into a neat little ending. This one feels as if it as after the denouement of the films and tacked on. At the end of Supremacy, he had finally found out who he is. But in this film, not really, and he seeks out the truth. He learns that sometimes you may not like who is staring at you from the mirror. This film felt like those twenty minutes in which you want to leave the theater after the end of a story except it’s two hours long.

Still, the action was great. Greengrass seems more confident and assured. He chose a more stylistic visual approach separate from his first Bourne movie and from following in Doug Liman’s footsteps. He uses this style to make the movie seems faster and frenetic. In the fight scenes, we are up close and in the room with the fighters, but we never lose track of what’s happening. In the car chases, the action is majestic.

Overall, it was a disappointment, but much, much better than the other trilogy enders this summer.

3 of 5 stars.

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.