Men in Black 3 (2012)

  Yes, you get a bonus post today because I feel guilty that I only got one in yesterday.  After the barbecue, Rob and I went to see Men in Black 3.  I was fully expecting it to suck but it turned out to be pretty decent, considering that it's been fourteen years since the disappointing sequel.

Agent J (Will Smith) and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) are going through a rough patch in their relationship when an evil alien from K's past named Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) escapes from the Lunar Supermax and steals a time traveling device.  J wakes up and is the only one that remembers K at all.  Their boss, Agent O (Emma Thompson) explains that K died at Boris' hands forty years ago.  Without Agent K and his Arcnet defense system, Boris' alien buddies will overwhelm the Earth.  J decides to go back to the day before K is killed and save him.  He goes to July 15, 1969 and discovers Young Agent K (Josh Brolin, a creepily accurate Tommy Lee Jones impersonator) is hot on the trail of Young Boris and convinces him to let him help out.  Hijinks ensue.

This one definitely went back to the original as far as entertainment values are concerned.  I didn't hate the second one, but it definitely suffered from an inflated sense of its own importance.  This one manages to be funny and still not lose the sense of the characters or why we should care about them.  I do not own Men in Black 2 but I will end up buying this one.

Zoom (2006)

  You've seen better superhero movies than this, the Christy pick for May.  That I can assure you. 

This movie would have been better served coming out in 1996, instead of 2006.  Tim Allen was a rising star, the concept would have been fresher, and the oldest kid's hairstyle would have been popular.    In 2006, it looks like everyone involved was trying waaaaay too hard.

Jack Shepard (Tim Allen) used to be a superhero named Zoom before he lost all his powers defeating his brother Concussion (Kevin Zegars) who had been turned evil in a failed government experiment.  What he doesn't know, is that Concussion is trying to make his way back from the dimension he was banished to and there's only 8 days to save the planet.  The government reopens the superhero wing of their super-secret Army base and recruits Jack back to train up the next generation of heroes.  He is surly and uncommunicative because he doesn't want these kids to become like him and his brother.  They're surly and uncommunicative because, well, they're children.  Eventually, little Cindy (Ryan Newman) breaks through his barriers with the sheer power of adorableness and he realizes that if he doesn't care for these kids no one will.

The film tries to shoehorn an entire graphic novel series into a two hour movie.  This is impossible, as you well know.  If they had been slightly more judicious in editing storylines, I think they could have made for a more streamlined, cleaner film.  Instead, they try to squash training montage after training montage to make you believe that, in a week's time, these kids went from Clark Kent to Superman while simultaneously having two romantic angles between Jack and Dr. Marsha Holloway (Courteney Cox) and the two older teenagers (Kate Mara and Michael Cassidy).  Maybe they knew they were never going to get a sequel and just decided to put everything they had into this one.  I don't know.

So, on a completely different note:  Happy Memorial Day.  This weekend has been crazy busy for me, which is unusual.  I've had to hang out with co-workers at a WNBA game (they had a skybox.  I've done more for less.)  Walking down to the Verizon Center in cute flats tore up my feet and I've had to hobble around the last couple of days waiting for them to heal.  Yesterday (Sunday), I went to a birthday party for Rob's friend because he couldn't go himself (work) and when you're a couple you have to step up and represent the team and then last night, he emails me and tells me he accepted an invitation for today to a barbecue and that we're bringing a dessert.

Now I don't do much.  But I do bake.  I like a little more of a head's-up generally but whatever.  I had Christy (I was texting her while I watched the movie) pick a number randomly and made it from my Gourmet Magazine cookbook.  Turned out to be Citrus Chiffon Cake, and it took about three hours to make.  We'll see if it's any good later.  Afterwards, I told Rob we were going to a movie so there will be at least one more post from me today.  Hope all of you celebrating today have an enjoyable and safe (if you die, who will read my blog?) time and stay tuned for my next adventure.

Watchmen (2009)

  I can't believe I haven't done this one already.  I could have sworn I had reviewed it when it first came out, but no.

I own this movie.  I know it polarized a lot of people, fans of the graphic novel and otherwise, when it came out but I have to say I was a fan.  For all of Zac Snyder's faults, he was a fanatic about sticking to the source material (as much as he could, but we'll get to that later) and every scene looks ripped right from the pages of the book.

I came to Watchmen relatively late in the game.  It was already nearly twenty years old when I read it.  By the end of it, I was horribly depressed, sickened even, by the massive dose of cynicism.  But it stuck with me and that in itself would be worthy of acclaim.  When I heard they were making it into a movie, the anticipation and fear were palpable.

It's an alternate 1985, where masked superheroes have been banned under legislation aimed at protecting the world against vigilantism.  The Cold War is raging, both the US and the USSR a hair's-breadth from nuclear Armageddon.  A loner named Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), discovers that the recent death of Edward Blake, aka The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is a deliberate attack against former masked crusaders and takes his findings to his old friend, Dan (Patrick Wilson), formerly known as the Nite Owl.  Dan doesn't want to go back to the old life, having grown disillusioned, but he cannot ignore Rorschach's warning, especially if it brings him back into contact with the lovely Laurie (Malin Ackerman).  Laurie is a second-generation superhero, following in her mother's (Carla Gugino) footsteps as Silk Spectre.  She is also the girlfriend of godlike ubermensch Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup).  Lately, however, Laurie has started to feel like an insect next to the increasingly removed being.  Rorschach, being a psychopath, doesn't give a shit about any of this.  He just wants to track down the person responsible for the death of the Comedian and the attempted assassination of Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), the smartest man in the world.

Visually, the movie is stunning and in many places looks as though the comic book came to life.  The ending is different, however, and a lot of people got really pissed about that.  I get it.  The original ending would have been way too difficult to pull off, given the time restraints, and the new one keeps the exact same outcome via a different medium.  Personally, I enjoyed it and I have enjoyed it on subsequent viewings.  Every actor in it is great, but Jackie Earle Haley is amazing.  This movie turned me into a fan of his singlehandedly.

Dark Shadows (2012)

  Finally got to go see this!  Was it worth it?  Eh.

I have talked about this before.  I am a Tim Burton fan.  It would take a LOT for me to not like one of his movies.  This is the closest I have come, however.

I never saw any of the original Dark Shadows TV show.  It was slightly before my time.  If the movie is any indication of what was in it, however, it might be worth picking up on Netflix.  I feel like the main problem of the movie was that it tried to condense a long-running series into a two hour movie.  There were a lot of elements at play, here.  There's the supernatural stuff, the family dynamic, the time shift and there's just not enough time to pay attention to all of them.

Let me break the movie down for you, then tell you my problems with it.

Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) has it made.  He's heir to a fishing fortune, looks like Johnny Depp, and has an entire town in Maine named for him.  Everyone loves him.  Unfortunately, that includes the hot maid, Angelique (Eva Green), who is a basket full of crazy and a witch.  First, she kills his parents, then his ladylove Josette (Bella Heathcote), and then curses him to be a vampire.  At her urging, the townsfolk lock him in a coffin bound by iron chains and bury him.  Two hundred years later, workers release Barnabas accidentally and he returns home to find the family estate practically in ruin, the fishing business barely limping by, and the family reduced to Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), her brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), her daughter Caroline (Chloe Moretz), his son David (Gulliver McGrath), Willy the handyman (Jackie Earle Haley), David's live-in therapist (Helena Bonham Carter), and the nanny (Bella Heathcote) who bears a striking resemblance to Josette.  He also finds Angelique, aged not a day, and in charge of rival fishery Angel Bay.  She's willing to let bygones be bygones...as long as he swears to love her for all time.  Got all that?

First off, there are way too many characters.  The therapist, for example.  Completely unnecessary to the plot and could easily have been cut and saved for the sequel, if there ever was one.  I know that she's Mrs. Tim Burton and she's in every movie he makes but she serves no purpose here.  Ditto, Christopher Lee.  Completely unnecessary cameo.  With that saved runtime, maybe we could have devoted more time to the actual family.  Like where Elizabeth's husband is.  Never gets mentioned.  Or any sort of dynamic between the brother and sister.  Like, "Roger is lazy but resents Elizabeth for taking the head of the family position while she hates that her brother whores around but is afraid to confront him because she worries it will split the family."  To me, that would be a more interesting film than watching Barnabas try and court his reincarnated sweetheart.

I thought Corpse Bride was his weakest effort but this movie makes it seem like high art.  If you're a Tim Burton fan, I encourage you to rent this one.  I almost bought the soundtrack but they didn't include the "Go All the Way" remake by The Killers played over the end credits and that was a dealbreaker for me.

The Jack Bull (1999)

  This might as well have been called The Law of Unintended Consequences.  Here's how it goes:  A cattle rancher named Ballard (L.Q. Jones) is pissed about the push for statehood in the Wyoming Territory because it will fuck up his attempts to buy all the land.  He bitches about it in public and asks the local horse trader, Myrl (John Cusack), his opinion.  Myrl answers honestly, unintentionally embarrassing Ballard.  In retaliation, Ballard puts up a toll gate over the road Myrl uses to take his horses to market.  The rate is exorbitant and Myrl is forced to leave two prize stallions and his Crow farmhand, Billy (Rodney A. Grant), at the gate as surety.  When he returns, the two horses have been reduced to shells of their former selves through deliberate mistreatment and Billy is nowhere to be found.  Later, we learn that Ballard's henchmen beat Billy and set their dogs on him.  Incensed, Myrl looks for legal redress but the judge is in Ballard's pocket.  Myrl's wife Cora (Miranda Otto) goes to Cheyenne to take his petition to the Attorney General (Jay O. Sanders).  Due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances unintentionally caused by Ballard's henchmen, Cora dies.  Thus freed from his Voice of Reason, Myrl takes the law into his own hands and begins to hunt Ballard.  He sells his ranch and offers a salary to anybody who would ride with him.  Ballard runs to Cheyenne to beg help from the Governor (Scott Wilson), who is preoccupied with the statehood delegates.  Myrl follows and unintentionally jeopardizes the pending statehood he espoused with his quest for justice.  The governor signs an agreement of amnesty, then freaks out when he is told that unintentionally absolves Myrl of two counts of murder.  To save face, they find a way to revoke the amnesty and put Myrl on trial.  Now he and Ballard both must face the consequences of their actions.  All this because one dude was a douche and the other one wouldn't let it go.

Good Lord, this movie was depressing.  Even for a Western.  It was originally a made-for-HBO movie and has a fairly impressive cast of people whose faces you'd recognize if not their names.  I love John Cusack but he wasn't exactly a perfect fit as a cowboy.  John Goodman played the judge in Cheyenne and completely stole the show, despite only having a fraction of the screen time.  John C. McGinley plays another of Myrl's farmhands and overacts like usual but he'll never be as good as he was in Scrubs to me.

Nothing new

I just felt bad about only getting one post in for you guys.  Rob's family came down for his commencement ceremony and I was busy running around with them for three days.  We went to Mount Vernon and Rockville, and the ceremony at UMUC, and even into DC proper where I had to remind myself that it is illegal to pull a cabbie out through his window and beat him to death with your high heel for driving like a spastic person right in front of you. 

Other than that, everything went great.

Now, rest assured, I did watch movies this weekend.  Unfortunately, they were all movies I have already reviewed.  Neither Rob nor his mother had ever watched Jaws all the way through so I remdied that.  Sadly, it seems that insisting on watching a slow-burning thriller at 1 a.m. after a bottle of wine is not one of my greatest plans ever. 

Sunday, we all went out for lunch and stopped by the theater to see The Avengers.  I pushed for Dark Shadows but nobody else wanted to see it.  It's still good on a second viewing, but the parental units had never seen Thor, so some of the jokes and references were lost on them.  Everybody was kind of burned out after that and we called it a short evening.  At least I did, since I had to be at work this morning. 

We'll try for three posts again this week. 

WALL-E (2008)

Everyone should have already seen this movie.  If you haven't, you're wrong.  Simple as that.  But it's not too late!  Go out and get this movie.  Buy it, download it, borrow it from one of your (cooler) friends.  But don't skimp; get the blu-ray.  Trust me.  The space scenes are worth it.

WALL-E is a trash compacting robot left on Earth after all the humans have abandoned it as uninhabitable.  He finds his life fulfilling for the most part, but feels as though he is missing out on love, which he knows about by watching Hello Dolly.  This changes when a ship lands bearing a sleek robot named Eve.  Unfortunately, Eve is on a mission to find proof that Earth is ready for humans again which WALL-E unintentionally provides in the form of a plant in a boot.  When Eve is set to go back to the floating cruise ship humans call home, WALL-E tags along.  There they discover a dastardly plot led by the ship's robot co-pilot, Auto.

It's Pixar.  What more do you need to know?  Also, it won an Oscar.

Lady Snowblood (1973)

  Ah, Japanese splatter films!  How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

First, there's the unreliable squibs that kick in a good second and a half after someone receives a death wound, forcing them to stand there and "Argh!" as hard as they can to make up for the lack of effects.  Squibs that then spray like a fire hose, drenching all nearby extras.

Then, there's the fact that it's clearly red paint.  None of that sissy karo syrup and food coloring, no!  They're going for volume and for that, you need a 2-for-1 sale five gallon drum of barn-door red paint from the local Home Depot.

Third, close ups.  Extreme close ups!  Like count-the-veins-in-your-heroine's-eyeballs kind of close ups.

Yuki was born in order to exact vengeance on the three people that ruined her mother's life.  Seriously, she has zero motivation other than that.  Her mother died in prison, and Yuki was raised by her mom's cellmate and a priest who basically abused her under the guise of "training" and constantly referred to her as a "child of the netherworlds".  As you can imagine, little Yuki didn't grow up to be the most stable of individuals.  She hits the road on her twentieth birthday to track down the three swindlers.  The first one is pretty easy since he's a total drunk whose own daughter is turning tricks to keep him fed.  Yuki has a moment's pause when she realizes that she actually likes the daughter but kills her dad anyway.

She hits a depressive turn when she learns that Villain #2 died in a shipwreck three years before she could find him, then gets pissed when the priest that raised her sells her story to a local author.  But, it does draw out Villain #3, a psycho bitch with a crazy-ass giggle.  Now facing unemployment, Yuki learns that Villain #2 is totally alive, and is actually an incredibly powerful arms dealer.  She and the writer must team up to sneak into #2's secret costume ball and slice his face off.

I can't emphasize enough that this is a crap film, suitable only for So-Bad-It's-Good nights.  If you're going to watch it, get like three of these and make a drunken marathon out of them.

The Avengers (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Visual Effects    Of course I went to see this movie.  I didn't get to go at midnight on Thursday because Rob had to work but you can bet we went as soon as he woke up on Friday afternoon. 

I specifically read as little as possible about it because I didn't want to be biased before I even saw it.  I did read one review on CHUD.com that said it sucked for the first thirty minutes, or until the Hulk showed up.  I think that's a little unfair.  It is very much a reflection on Joss Whedon, however.  If you're a fan of Serenity or his various TV shows, you probably won't mind as much.  I'd go as far to say that the first half of the movie is very talk-heavy, while the second half is more action-heavy.  I think they did a good job, considering that pretty much everyone in this movie has their own movie to star in either out previously or coming soon.  I hear Mark Ruffalo got signed for a 6 picture deal.  I'm not even mad at him for it, either, much as I loved Edward Norton's version.

Loki (Tom Hiddleston) got himself some new allies in the form of aliens called the Chitauri.  With their backing, he storms S.H.I.E.L.D headquarters and walks out with the Tesseract (the blue cube from Captain America), while mind-controlling Dr. Eric Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) and Clint Barton aka Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) with his shiny new Tesseract-powered spear.

Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) immediately implements the Avengers Initiative consisting of Captain America (Chris Evans), Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson), Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), and Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.)  They confront Loki in Germany only to have Thor (Chris Hemsworth) show up and demand that they hand his errant brother over for Asgardian justice.  This does not go over well, as you can imagine, and amidst their superhero bickering Loki starts some shit.

My only real problem with this movie is such a spoiler that I can't actually write it down.  Suffice to say, there is a moment in the film that involves a sacrifice and it is handled so clumsily in an attempt to be "knowing" that it put a bad taste in my mouth the rest of the film.  It's not something so big that it ruins the experience but it annoyed me pretty thoroughly.  Two specific scenes with the Hulk, however, more than make up for it.

Wag the Dog (1997)

  Every time I watch this movie, I laugh harder.  I'm not big into politics for the same reasons that I'm not into pageants.  Everyone's lying about who they are, what they stand for, and what they plan to do.  A movie like this really only reinforces the possibility that it's all just a big game played on us.  I showed it to Rob, who had never seen it before.  He liked it but felt it was extremely cynical. 

Duh.  It's like he's never met me.

The President is in trouble.  He is up for re-election in two weeks and a local Firefly Girl is alleging that she was touched inappropriately in the Oval Office.  He calls in Conrad Breen (Robert DeNiro), his fixer, to help him.  Conrad and the President's aide, Winifred (Anne Heche), go to Hollywood to see famous producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman).  See, Conrad has an idea that will divert attention away from a sex scandal:  fabricate a war with Albania.

Everything that follows is amazing.  Images are crafted to appeal directly to the heartstrings of the public.  Songs are written.  Promotional tie-ins are made.  It's all extremely fake but extremely plausible.    Not even people who actually know there isn't a war (specifically CIA director Charles Young (William H. Macy)) can stop this juggernaut.  They suffer a minor set-back when the opposing Senator Neal (Craig T. Nelson) ends the war before they're ready, but they brilliantly counter with the moving story of SGT William Schumann (Woody Harrelson), a soldier lost behind enemy lines.

The entire movie is one jab after another at the political machine, the complacency of voters, the increasing role television has in our social consciousness, and the self-centered apathy of the Hollywood elite.  It's phenomenal and I highly encourage everyone to see it.