The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

  This movie was hilarious but not in a side-splitting from laughter kind of way.  Everything in it is funny in an amusingly cynical sci-fi way.

For those that didn't hear about it, most of the stuff in here is true.  During the Cold War, the US Army experimented with ways to make psychic soldiers.  Now, whether or not they actually called them "Jedi warriors" I do not know, but it helps you like the movie more if you are already a Star Wars fan.  Mostly they centered their research on Remote Viewing, which is where you have a soldier sit in a room somewhere on your side and have him/her be able to tell you what is going on in a room somewhere on the enemy's side.  What the movie doesn't say is that the project was scrapped because the results were only ever slightly higher than blind guessing.

Bob (Ewan McGregor) is a journalist whose wife has left him for another man, prompting him to try embedding himself with a unit over in Iraq.  While waiting for his paperwork to go through, he meets Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney), an Army Jedi on a secret mission.  Bob follows Lyn around until he can get the full story of this battle between the Light and the Dark.  Lyn tells Bob about how he was recruited into the New Earth Army, a brainchild of Bill Jango (Jeff Bridges) but that they were eventually betrayed and disbanded by one of Bill's students (Kevin Spacey, Sith lord).  The whole thing is absurd and bizarre but Bob begins to believe, despite himself.

It's adorable, really.  Better than Burn After Reading, that's for sure.

Ninja Assassin (2009)

  I heart the shit out of this movie.  I saw it when it came out in theaters and I'm actually really surprised I didn't review it then.  I just saw it again at home and it made me so happy.

I remember thinking that it was probably going to be a crap film but that I was going to watch it anyway because fuck it, I love ninjas and assassins.  How could this go wrong?  And I was surprised by precisely how much violence they could fit into one movie.  Graphic, bloody violence from the opening scene til the credits roll.

For the three of you that think the plot matters, here you go:  Raizo is a ninja.  He was an orphan raised to serve one of the Nine Clans of ninja and assassinate their enemies.  He grows up alongside the lovely Keiko, who refuses to conform to the killing ways and ends up executed as a lesson to others.  Raizo eventually rejects the teaching as well and goes rogue, tracking his fellow clanmates down one at a time. Mika (28 Days Later's Naomie Harris) is a Europol forensic researcher who comes across the Nine Clans and immediately goes to the top of their shit list.

What more do you need?  Did I mention the violence?  There's so much of it.  Action porn at its best.

Kabluey (2007)

The poster for this movie intrigued me so I added it to my queue. I like weird things.

I don't generally like independent films since they typically have no budgets and vacuous, existential I'm-in-film-school-and-I'm-an-artist plots. 

This one was pretty good, though and it's mostly due to casting really good child actors.  Seriously, kids generally suck at acting.  Especially the under-10 crowd.  Their little brains just aren't wired to have the same idea for more than five minutes, much less their characters' motivations in relation to the plotline.  The kid who plays the oldest child, Cameron Woffard, hasn't been in a lot yet (which will probably keep him from being a trainwreck later in life) but he was great in this movie.

Leslie (Lisa Kudrow) is a woman on the edge.  Her husband has just been extended indefinitely in Iraq and she has two screaming little monsters at home who will lose health care if she doesn't go back to work but can't be left alone.  (Which is actually total bullshit since military spouses and dependants are covered for medical and dental, but the point is that she's overwhelmed and out of options.)  She ends up having to call her brother-in-law, Salman (writer and director Scott Prendergast), a well-meaning but clueless slacker, to come in and help out.

After having proved beyond a doubt that he is a lousy baby-sitter, even without her passive-aggressive bitchiness, Leslie gets him a job as the mascot for her company, a dot-com business that took a huge hit in the market and is now attempting to rent out their incredibly expensive office space with a skeleton crew, as a mascot handing out flyers. 

The mascot is a blue humanoid with an oversized head.  Cute as a tiny logo, bizarre as a six-foot costume.  Having worn a similar get-up once upon a time (no, I will not share details), I can say with some certainty that the experiences he had are absolutely real.  It is insanely hot, heavy, and the visual field is incredibly limited.  Since my bosses weren't the spawns of Satan, I was required to take a break every half hour and had a handler to guide me around.  Salman's boss (Conchata Ferrell, the acerbic maid from Two and a Half Men) leaves him on the side of a highway next to a corn field for 10 hours a day.

Slowly, Salman starts to realize that other people's well-being depends on him and begins taking more of an active interest in life.  This is about the time he realizes that his sister-in-law is having an affair with her boss (Harry Dean Morgan). 

There are some excellent cameos, especially from Teri Garr as a woman irrationally terrified of the Kabluey suit.  It's well-worth a rental.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1994)

  I've tried to make a point of watching all of the Miyazaki animation, even the ones obviously geared toward children.  The animations are always stunning and the stories are usually decent.  I have the Disney releases through Studio Ghibli so the English casts are always a who's-who of talent as well.

...I mean, I totally watch them all in the original format...ahem.

This one isn't the strongest, story-wise.  It's a little too heavy-handed on the environmentalism message for me and it comes off a little stilted.

Princess Nausicaa lives in one of the last unspoiled valleys of a world slowly being overcome with a toxic forest of mold.  As the name implies, the valley relies on wind power from the sea to keep the mold spores away.  Then an airship carrying a strange cargo and a kidnapped princess crashes nearby and the valley inhabitants are suddenly thrust into the middle of a war between two neighboring countries, the Tolmekians and the Pejites.  The princess in the ship was Pejite and only survives a minute after the crash but the cargo is unharmed.  They learn that it is the only remnant of giant fire-men that burned the world to ash a thousand years ago.  The Tolmekians want to use it to destroy the Toxic Jungle once and for all.  Nausicaa, being a wind-riding hippie, is dead-set against this.  With the assistance of the dead princess' brother, she sets out to stop all the senseless fighting.

Also, there are giant bugs.  Like the size of a bus.

The English cast has luminaries such as Patrick Stewart, Chris Sarandon, Edward James Olmos, and Uma Thurman.  Allison Lohman plays the titular Princess, and Shia LaBeouf is in this for some reason or another.  Still, he's less annoying when I can't see his hideous fish lips.

D.E.B.S. (1999)

  This was a fairly cute little PG-13 movie.  Most of the actors are solid, if wasted here.  The plot is a fairly standard "good guy falls for bad guy" and the humor is played so broadly that it falls a trifle flat.  But not bad, over all.  I'd say it's pretty decent if you have teens.

The D.E.B.S. are a super-secret organization of high school girls, recruited through the SATs.  Their elite team consists of Max, the hard-charging team leader; Amy, the "perfect score"; Janet, still looking to earn her stripes; and Dom, the chain-smoking French-speaking Asian.

The girls' nemesis is crime boss and evil mastermind Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster). 

You can probably tell immediately who I was rooting for.

The girls are staked out at a restaurant where intel says that Lucy is meeting with a Russian assassin but finding out who the target is supposed to be takes a backseat to Amy wrangling with Homeland Security agent Bobby, about returning a bracelet after their recent breakup.  The bracelet falls into Lucy's soup and the restaurant erupts in gunfire.

Separated from her team, Amy runs into Lucy and they punctuate a Mexican stand-off with some girl chat.  Lucy mentions that it wasn't a business meeting, it was a blind date, and Amy blurts that she's doing her thesis on Lucy Diamond and the psychology of the female mastermind.  The team shows up and Lucy escapes.  Amy is lauded as being the only one to have ever gone toe-to-toe with Diamond and lived to tell the tale.

The next night, she is kidnapped by Lucy because that's how you get a date if you're the head of an international crime syndicate.  Janet is also kidnapped because she's in the wrong place at the wrong time and it ends up a very awkward double date with her second-in-command, Scud.  After the date, Amy and Janet are returned to the not-secret-at-all DEBS house where Janet is sworn to secrecy on pain of never getting her stripes and Amy struggles with her feelings for Lucy.

During another mission, Lucy manages to convince Amy to leave the team and run away with her.  The DEBS commander (Holland Taylor) loses her shit completely since Amy was supposed to be their poster child and orders an all-out assault.  The other three team-mates burst into Lucy's lair (also not well concealed) and find Amy...in bed with the enemy.  Ta da!

Cue the dejected"how will I ever choose betweeen who I am and who everyone wants me to be?" music and montage. 

I have to say that Meagan Good, who plays Max, probably gets the gold star for acting.  I recognized her from Brick, one of my all-time favorite movies.  Of all the characters, she's the only one that's not complete camp.  Devon Aoki has a lot of screen time but almost no lines, which makes me wonder if she has a speech impediment or something.  I've only ever seen her in Sin City where she also had no lines and War, which I didn't even remember she was in until I saw it listed on her IMDB page.  To be fair, I've tried to block that movie from my memory so maybe that's not her fault. 

In other news, I finally finished my MST3K marathon.  That only took since May.

Dead Snow (2009)

  Nazi zombies.

Come on, you don't get much better than that.  Those are the only two groups of humanoids that nobody will get mad about if you go on killing sprees and here they are, combined in one unholy union!

I don't know what it is about the Nordic countries recently, but they have been cranking out some good horror films.  First was Let the Right One In, one of the best vampire movies I've seen in years, out of Sweden, this one from Norway, and the upcoming Trollhunter, which releases tomorrow.  That one may not be a straight-out horror but it's filmed in a Blair Witch Project style that should make for some decent suspense. 

This movie obviously loves Evil Dead and Dead Alive (or Braindead if you're interested in the original New Zealand title).  Hell, one of the characters wears a Braindead T-shirt and tries to get the others to participate in listing horror movies where the characters are stranded without cell phones.  There's even the requisite Highly Suspect Old Man who shows up and gives 90% of the film's backstory as a creepy fireside tale.

The protagonists are 6 good-looking Norwegian medical students out for a camping trip in the mountains.  Unfortunately, during WWII, the Nazis had been occupying the nearby village and terrorizing the people.  After making one last attempt to steal all the gold and silver from the townspeople, the Nazis were chased up into the mountains where they froze to death.  The hikers unknowingly disturb a box of looted gold under their cabin while searching for beer and awaken the corpses of Colonel Herzog and his zombie minions. 

I was surprised at how much I liked the soundtrack, considering that it's a bit harder than I usually listen to and in freakin' Norwegian.  It really added to the fun ambiance of the film.  I know there are a lot of you who hate subtitles but don't worry, most of the dialogue is screaming so you should be fine.  There is a LOT of gore so if you are opposed to the sight of zombies being chainsawed in half, well, we really can't be friends.

Death at a Funeral (2007)

Today is my birthday!  Here's an unrelated movie.    This is the original British version, not the 2010 remake.  Yes, Peter Dinklage is playing the same character in both.  I can't speak as to a direct comparison since I've only seen this one, but from the trailer for the Chris Rock version, it looks like a shot-for-shot remake.  I guess it comes down to which flavor of accent you prefer.

The movie is hilarious.  For those that may not know or remember, it's about a pair of brothers: Robert, a successful but irresponsible author who moved to New York and Daniel, living in his shadow while trying to take care of their mother, who discover at their father's funeral that he had a gay dwarf lover.  Who is now extorting them for fifteen thousand pounds because he wasn't mentioned in the will.  Meanwhile, their cousin Martha's fiance (Alan Tudyk who is always fabulous) was accidentally dosed with a designer hallucinogen from a Valium bottle and is running amok.  Daniel must somehow keep this secret underwraps to maintain his father's reputation which becomes exponentially harder as the film goes on and the "Valium" circulates.

Ensemble casts are always a bit harder to judge since the screen time is divided and it's easier for the cast to help carry each other.  There were no real discordant notes here.  Everybody did their jobs and did them well.  Dinklage's accent was a little weird.  He didn't try for British but he wasn't exactly American, either.  But it didn't really matter because his face was hilarious.  He managed to get across more with his eyebrows than I've seen from actors with whole monologues.  The only project IMDB lists for him coming up is Knights of Badassdom, which I will probably see, but I'm sure he'll also be in the second season of Game of Thrones next year.

But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)

Can I just take a minute and say how much I love stat-checking?  So much.  Seriously, 19 people did a Google search for this blog by name.  By.  Name.  (What, you people don't know what the "Follow" button is for?)  And that's just this week!  Holy shit, that makes me happy.  I know it's not cool to get excited about stuff on the Internet but I only started this blog because I needed a safe place to spew wordvomit about movies so my co-workers wouldn't beat me to death with gardening implements.  The fact that I've had almost 300 hits this month and it's only halfway over makes my pitted little coal-black heart swell with joy.  Then I go to some other sites and see they get that many hits per minute and come back down to reality.  But for those brief seconds, I am filled with bliss.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

  This was a fun, campy movie about a girl whose family figures out she's a lesbian waaaay before she does and sends her to a rehabilitation facility.  It stars Natasha Lyonne and Clea Duvall, who I'm surprised isn't a bigger star by now.  She's done a lot of TV work (Heroes and Carnivale jump to mind) but no really good starring vehicles.  It's a shame too. 

There are a lot of famous or at least recognizable characters in small roles like Michelle Williams, RuPaul, Eddie Cibrian, Melanie Lynskey (with her real accent), Dante Basco (Rufio from Hook), and Julie Delpy. 

There is an entire sub-genre of gay and lesbian films that I am nowhere near as well-versed in as I should be.  Granted, I'm not well-versed in any particular genre but I feel kind of bad that I've been oblivious to this one for so long.  If anyone knows any really good gay films that aren't the Twilight series, hit up the comments and let me know. 

A lot of the humor here comes from how naive these kids in the rehab facility are.  They are genuinely committed to becoming straight, eagerly participating in 'gender assignment' activities (cleaning and putting on makeup for the girls and football and chopping wood for the boys) and coming up with ridiculous 'root' stories about what event in their formative years made them gay.  There is almost no focus on the severe cognitive dissonance involved in denying who they are in order to fit into what the people around them want them to be, opting instead to highlight the absurdities using sight gags and stereotypes.  Which isn't to say that it's not funny.  It is.  A lot of the gags have been done before (and since) but they're delivered well, which keeps them fresh enough for one viewing.  Not enough for me to buy, but a fun rental nonetheless.

Libeled Lady (1936)

This is another Powell and Loy feature.  Here they share billing with Spencer Tracy and beauty queen Jean Harlow, who fell completely flat for me.  This is the first film I've ever seen her in (and a quick scan of her biography makes me feel really bad for trashing her) but her voice was godawful.

The movie was rather slow for me until Powell actually shared screen time with Loy.  I swear, I don't know what it is with those two but I lurves them.  I want to re-animate their corpses and just keep them forever.  I'd have little matching outfits and jeweled collars and ...I'm getting off-track.

Stop looking at me like that.

Anyway, the movie is about a newspaper editor named Haggerty (Spencer Tracy) who is being sued for libel by an American socialite (Myrna Loy) for running a story claiming that she tried to steal someone else's husband.  The paper is in the wrong, I just want to make that clear at the outset.  They tried to pull the story but were unsuccessful and are now being sued for $5 million.  There is some long-standing feud between the owner of the paper and Mr. Allenbury (Walter Connolly), the father of the libeled lady, and if the paper loses the suit (which they will, cuz they're wrong) Allenbury will close them down.  Haggerty decides to hire his old nemesis Bill Chandler (William Powell) to catch Connie Allenbury in a compromising position with a married man, thus forcing her to drop the suit.  But Bill's not married.  The solution?  Have him marry Haggerty's long-suffering girlfriend (Jean Harlow).  She already has a dress, since Haggerty left her at the altar just that morning.  Of course, Bill ends up falling for the lovely Connie and can't bear the thought of her reputation being tarnished.  Now he must tap-dance between his romance and keeping Haggerty and his "wife" out of the picture.

I will say that Harlow does have one decent twist at the end of the film that provides some indication that her character is more than just a cardboard cut-out, but good screen moments with her are due more to Powell's influence than any innate talent. 

All in all, a decent film with some classic witty banter but unless you're a huge fan of one of the big four stars, probably not one for the Christmas list.

Love Crazy (1941)

  Another William Powell/Myrna Loy film.  I think Powell actually came off better than Loy in this case.  There didn't seem to be as much for her to do here.

Stephen and Susan Ireland (Powell and Loy) are about to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary when they are crashed by Susan's overbearing, can't-take-a-hint mother (Florence Bates) who manages to fall on the rug she gives them as a present.  Susan has to go pick up an aunt from the train station, leaving Stephen to baby-sit Mom.  He has just learned that old flame Isabelle (Gail Patrick) has moved into the apartment downstairs and enlists her help in getting away from the old battleax.  Mommie Dearest, who isn't nearly as hurt as she was pretending, overhears the exchange and gleefully tells Susan on her return.  Susan decides to teach Stephen a lesson by being "caught" with Isabelle's husband but ends up with the wrong neighbor (Jack Carson).  Hijinks ensue.

Things take a turn for the serious when Susan finds out that Stephen had lied to her about taking a cab to a bar with Isabelle and she files for divorce.  Desperate not to lose his wife, Stephen decides to delay the proceedings by being declared insane.  Susan, smelling a rat, has him committed.  Soon they both find that it's much easier to get into a nuthouse than out of one as all of Stephen's cute quirks (elaborate anniversary traditions, drunken party acts) are counted as signs of mental imbalance. 

This one was a little too screwball-y for my personal tastes.  I like Powell better when he's trading quips rather than tripping over himsef.  Plus, I think Myrna is better at physical comedy than he is.  She has this adorable bewildered expression that carries the gag further and makes her continued gaffes seem more believable.  Still, their chemistry is as outstanding as always.  I don't know that they've made a bad movie between the two of them.

Friends With Benefits (2011)

  Saw this as a double date with New Boyfriend, his friend, and his friend's fiancee.  I was kind of 'meh' on the concept but the execution was surprisingly good.  Reminded me a lot of Easy A, which makes sense since it's the same director.  He also did Fired Up.

There are a ton of cameos in this movie from Emma Stone, Andy Samberg, Masi Oka, Jason Segal and Shaun White, plus great turns from Patricia Clarkson and Woody Harrelson (playing a gay sports editor.  Outstanding.)

The premise is incredibly hackneyed:  two emotionally stunted people decide to sleep together without being in a relationship and end up falling in love with each other which causes them to ruin said relationship and one of them has to make a fool of themselves in public to win the other person back.  You've seen it before.  Hell, there was another movie earlier this year that was the exact same thing.  It's in my queue but it's pretty far down.  #429 to be exact.

Anyway, Mila Kunis is watchable in damn near everything (excpet American Psycho 2 which completely sucked) and she's adorable here.  Justin Timberlake ran hot and cold for me, though.  There were moments where I thought he was great but those were usually when his character or the situation was over the top.  When he was just trying to be a "regular guy" it rang false for me.  That being said, the dialogue is what put this movie from "Eh" to "Thumbs Up".  There are some fantastic one-liners in here and they are delivered non-stop.  I'm going to have to see it at least one more time just to catch the ones I missed while I was laughing in the theater.  And to see Woody Harrelson's gay sports editor again.  Priceless.

There is a bit of genuine pathos in the film coming from Timberlake's family which is provided entirely by Richard Jenkins in a spot-on performance.  I almost wish they had taken the film more in that direction because I think it would have made for a more solid story instead of just an endless series of Mila and Justin rolling around naked.

Super 8 (2011)

  I wasn't very interested in seeing this when it first came out.  Don't get me wrong; I love Spielberg and I'm starting to really appreciate JJ Abrams.  The whole idea of it left me cold, though.  I mean, we already have The Goonies and E.T. so why would we need this one?  I'm all for video mash-ups but come on.

But New Boyfriend wanted to see it, so what the hell.  If it sucked I could just use it as leverage to make him see something I want to see that he doesn't, like Dead Snow. 

It doesn't suck.  In fact, if I had been in the 5th grade, it probably would have been my favorite movie so far this year.  New Boyfriend disagrees with me on whether this film is suitable for the younger set or not, mostly because he practically jumped out of his skin when the moster slams into an Air Force prison bus when all the kids are locked inside.  Why are five pre-teen boys locked in the back of an Air Force prison bus?  Watch and find out.

It's summer in the late 70's and Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) has had a rough year.  Four months before school lets out, his mom is killed in a factory accident and his dad (Kyle Chandler), the town deputy, withdraws into a manly emotion-coma.  All Joe wants is to spend the summer helping his friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) finish a zombie film for submission to a young film-makers festival.  They even manage to get local age-appropriate hottie Alice (Elle Fanning) to be their female lead.  While filming a touching scene between the two leads, the kids witness a truly epic train vs pickup match.  In a surprise finish, the truck is the clear winner, being the lone survivor and the kids manage to talk the driver who turns out to be the school science teacher.  Meanwhile, a creature escapes from the train compartment and the US Air Force sweeps into town.  Most of this takes a backseat to the developing rapport between Joe and Alice, despite their dads' hatred for each other.  (Alice's dad was drunk and called out of his shift, which Joe's mother took and it got her killed.)  Can we say Romeo + Juliet, anyone?  But pretty soon, Deputy Dad is way too busy trying not to get his town annihilated by the monster or the military to give a damn about who his kid is hanging out with, especially after the sheriff disappears.

Then the creature takes Alice and it is on for some child gang rescue ops.  This is easily the best part of the movie, where the kids take matters into their own hands since everyone around them is either useless, distracted, or actively out to get them.

All of the child actors in this movie do great jobs in their respective roles.  I have some particular love for Cary (Ryan Lee), the pyromaniac with the severe overbite.  Doesn't everyone wish they had a bag full of illegal firecrackers at some point?  He's also the one most likely to end up with his name on several watchlists.  I respect that.

The Opposite of Sex (1998)

Sorry for the delay here.  Got caught up in doing stuff (not that stuff!) with New Boyfriend.

This wasn't a very good movie.  I could see where they were going with it, but it suffers from a major flaw for me:  an insufferably unlikeable narrator.

DeeDee Truitt (Christina Ricci) is a sociopathic 16-year-old who runs away from her Louisiana home to live with her gay half-brother Bill (Martin Donovan) and his hot-but-stupid boyfriend, Matt (Ivan Sergei) in the house he inherited from his previous lover, Tom (Colin Ferguson from Eureka.  Yeah I was surprised, too).  DeeDee's default position is homophobia but it's mostly the product of her redneck upbringings and not an inborn judgment. 

She manages to seduce Matt, announce that she's pregnant, and steal ten grand from her brother's safe deposit box before absconding to parts unknown.  In the wake of this, one of Matt's former lovers appears and threatens to ruin Bill's professional reputation if he doesn't reveal Matt's location.  Lucia (Lisa Kudrow), his best friend and sister of dead Tom, is incensed and the pair go to LA to track the errant runaways down. 

Once there, the paternity of the child is called into question, dead Tom's ashes are held for ransom, and DeeDee changes men faster than models change clothes.  One is never quite sure what her goals are, other than Get Away.  There's a lot of reflection about the nature of love vs sex and it's all pretty much rubbish.

There are a few great one-liners and a few scenes that are good on their own but overall, the film is pretty crap.  The plot is overcomplicated, leaving little time for real character development and I found its flippancy grating.  Maybe in '98 it would have been edgy but it does not stand up well in 2011.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

  For August, Christy offered me a Sophie's Choice of shitty movies:  Eclipse or The English Patient.  At least Eclipse was shorter.

Is this series over yet?  Jesus.  If possible, this one was more boring than the previous one.  Sparkles McFangface and Chief Runs-Without-a-Shirt are back to bickering over who gets the Little Wooden Doll.  She is apparently worse luck than the tiki idol from The Brady Show since the redheaded vampire from the first movie (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard instead of Rachelle Lefevre) created an army of baby vampires in order to kill her.  Well, about 20, but that's over twice the size of the cast.

Wooden Doll has made up her mind to become a vampire and is pressuring Sparkles to just give it up already, but he doesn't want to do it until they're married all nice and proper-like.  This displeases Chief Smells-Like-Wet-Dog who is convinced that if she just tries a warm-blooded boyfriend, she'll like it.  There's some stupid bullshit in a tent, then Stick Figure makes some truly spectacular leaps in logic (one of the vampires has a flashback to Civil War Texas, where some chick dickmatized him into helping her raise an army of vampires so, of course, it has to be the exact same thing now, which it is because this movie is stupid) and none of the cast dies.  Better luck next time.

Also, that "engagement ring" is freakin' hideous.  It's like a flattened disco ball on her twiggy finger.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

  Finally got to see this with New Boyfriend.  It's not bad.  I know the critics have been savaging it.  (44% on Rotten Tomatoes.)  It's not as good as Iron Man, by any stretch, but it's not a waste of film.

I suppose I was expecting a lot more from Harrison Ford.  Lately it seems like Indy has been playing the Grizzled Old Man card one too many times.  One of my favorite things about him as an actor was how mobile his face was.  He had the best range of expressions and a lot of the humor in his movies came when he didn't say anything at all.  He'd just throw a Look and it would be enough.  That is sadly lacking in this film.  Granted, he's playing a man of questionable motives but still, a little flexibility would have been nice.  Everybody else in the movie did a great job, especially Daniel Craig but I expect no less from James Bond.

Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) wakes up with no memory and an interesting bracelet in the middle of the desert.  He's set upon by three disreputable types with fresh scalps on their pommels and he murders the shit out of them, gaining a new wardrobe, a horse, and a dog.  He then proceeds to the nearest town, a two-bit mining village on its last leg, being supported solely on the money Colonel Dolarhyde's (Harrison Ford) cattle brings.  His son (Paul Dano) acts exactly like the spoiled only child of the town's richest man, drunkenly firing a gun in the streets.  Jake teaches him a sharp lesson on the end of his knee and Dolarhyde Junior shoots a deputy in the arm.  The Sheriff (Keith Carradine) arrests him, then arrests Jake (with a little help from Olivia Wilde) for holding up a gold shipment.  Col Dolarhyde's gold.  So the angry daddy comes to town with a posse to a) get his kid back and b) string up Lonergan.

Then the aliens show up and start fly-fishing for settlers, roping them and carrying them off.  You've seen this bit in the trailer, where Jake's bracelet comes alive and he's able to use it to bring down one of the ships.

The people taken include the Sheriff, Dolarhyde's son, and Sam Rockwell's wife.  So a posse is put together to track one of the aliens who had been hurt back to its base camp.  From this point, it's very much like a typical quest movie.  There are some decent laughs, mostly provided by Craig, though Walton Goggins (Justified) has a great small part.

Overall, I probably wouldn't buy it but it was a decent enough summer film.  Matinee or rental.

Dummy (2003)

Any movie involving a ventriloquist's dummy is automatically creepy.  I'm sorry, that's just the way it is.

This one manages to not be as disturbing as, say, The Great Gabbo, mostly by virtue of Adrian Brody being the ventriloquist.  He actually did all of the puppet work for the movie, which now promotes him to "Celebrity whose dinner party invitation I would decline".  It actually reminded me a lot of Todd Solondz's work (inherently fucked up people trying so hard to be normal) except it didn't make me want to scrub myself with bleach and/or make penance at a local church. 

Steven (Adrian Brody) is a nice guy living with his dysfunctional family.  He buys a ventriloquist's dummy because he's weird.  His permanently adolescent friend, Fanny (Milla Jovovich), is just as weird but at least she's too stupid to know it. 

Steven lives at home with his well-meaning but detached parents and his sister, Heidi (Ileana Douglas) who is still trying to recover from breaking off her engagement with Michael the psycho accountant (Jared Harris) while trying to run a wedding planner business.

Steven loses his dead-end job and meets Lorena (Vera Farmiga), his unemployment counselor who encourages his bizarre hobby and even helps him get a talent agent.  Meanwhile, Fanny is willing to do anything to get her garage band a gig, even if that means learning Yiddish so Heidi will hire them as a klezmer act. 

OH HELL YES MILLA ROCKS THE SHIT OUT OF SOME FIDDLER ON THE ROOF JAMS!  That, right there, would have been worth renting this movie.  But, on top of that, there's a hilarious showdown between Michael, Heidi, Steven and Lorena at the wedding.  For an independent film, that's pretty good.  Usually they only have about two good scenes and no name actors trying to put themselves through film school.

Cars 2 (2011)

  This is one of those times where I went to the theater and just saw whatever was playing soonest.  It's not my fault.  New Boyfriend asked me to wait until he got back from vacation so we could see Cowboys and Aliens together.  Blame him.

This is the worst reviewed film Pixar has ever had.  Even still, it doesn't suck as much as some movies I've seen.  I think the main problem is that it doesn't know who its audience is.  If you made it live-action, same script, same cast, it would work as a spy film, something along the lines of If Looks Could Kill.  If you replaced Richard Grieco with Larry the Cable Guy.

A lateral move, some would say.

Tow Mater is very much the star of this movie, accompanying his friend Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) to the World Grand Prix, hosted by Sir Miles Axelrod (Eddie Izzard).  Sir Miles is throwing this race in order to tout his new alternative fuel Allinol.  However, the evil society of lemons has rigged a device capable of shooting electromagnetic pulses at cars and blowing their engine blocks.  Superspy extraordinaire Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and his technology proficient contact Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) are tracking this device.  Their American contact in deep cover (motherfuckin' Bruce Campbell!) gets jumped in a Towkyo (ugh) bathroom and manages to stash the info onto Mater's chassis.  Cue the comical mistaken identity music.

I don't have children and I don't make a habit of being around them so I can't really say whether or not kids would get all the jokes, or even the majority of the plot.  How many kids grasp the conflict of fossil fuels versus alternative energy?

As in every Pixar film, there are several references to other Pixar films.  In Radiator Springs, for example, the movie playing on the drive-in is The Incredimobiles, and during the race in Paris, you can see the frontage for Gastow's, the restaurant from Ratatouille.  I didn't see anything that would count as a sneak peek at their new feature, Brave, but I'm sure it was there.

Honestly, I felt the ticket price was totally worth the short at the beginning, which concerned Barbie and Ken's Hawaiian vacation after Toy Story 3.  Adorable.  If something had happened and that was the only part I had seen, I would have been okay with that.