Adam and Dog (2012)/Head Over Heels (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Animated Short    Thank God for rowthree.com.  They linked to all the Animated Shorts so I can check this category off completely.  Only one more week til the Oscars!  Are you excited yet?

This is a 15-min movie that tells the biblical story of the Fall from Eden from the perspective of Adam's dog.  It's interesting in concept and the animation is very pretty.  I feel like they could have cut it down slightly, though, as I got a little bored about halfway through.  There's no dialogue and barely any music, it's mostly just bird sounds and barking. 

  This short is super-cute.  Walter and Madge have been married a long time but have grown apart, to the point where she lives on the ceiling and he lives on the floor.  But when Walter finds the shoes Madge wore on their wedding day, he decides to try defying their opposite gravities.  Again, there's no dialogue but I found this more entertaining than Adam and Dog.

I take it back.  They don't have The Longest Daycare embedded, just the teaser.  I think I can probably get it on the DVD of the latest Ice Age movie, though.

Murder! (1930)

  I'm going to go ahead and post this one tonight because I'll be on the road back to Maryland all day tomorrow.  

Remember when I was doing all my Hitchcock movies and I told you guys that my mom is a huge fan?  (I actually don't remember if I said that or not and I'm far too lazy to go back and look it up.)  She's a huge fan.  So I asked her last night to suggest something for me to watch and she picked Murder!

It's about an actress named Diana Baring (Norah Baring) who is convicted of killing a rival actress and sentenced to hang.  She doesn't remember anything about the incident, but the evidence was overwhelming and a jury of her peers found her guilty.  Except that after the sentencing, one of the jurors, Sir John (Herbert Marshall) starts to think that maybe she was innocent.  So he recruits the stage manager of Diana's former troupe (Edward Chapman) to help him investigate.

This is another of those police-bungle-everything-so-only-amateurs-solve-cases type of "mystery" movies.  For one thing, Sir John is portrayed as having known the defendant, which would bar him from being on a jury.  This is apparently a departure the movie makes from the book, which simply had him as an observer at her trial.  There are other little things as well that make the movie seem more smug than suspenseful. 

Overall, I would say that it is very much a relic of its time and not nearly as classic as some of Hitchcock's other films. 

Hotel Transylvania (2012)

  I'm down in Alabama this weekend, visiting family but that's not going to stop me from watching movies.  My mother has been trying to get me to watch this one for several weeks now but I've been kind of busy with my Oscar list.  I don't really have access to all my stuff here, though, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

It's okay.  Not great, and I can see why it wasn't nominated for anything, but it's cute.

After a bad experience with humans, Dracula (Adam Sandler) builds a sanctuary hotel for monsters out in the middle of nowhere.  However, when his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez), turns 118, she decides she wants to see the world.  Terrified of losing her, Dracula builds a fake "village" staffed by zombie bellhops in human masks in order to scare her into staying home.  This seems to work until a random backpacker named Jonathan (Andy Samberg) finds his way into the hotel by following the shambling undead.  When boy sees Vampire Girl, they instantly click.  Dracula is less than pleased and spends the majority of the movie trying to keep his guests from finding out their greatest hunter is among them.

The movie features voice work from Kevin James, Steve Buscemi, Cee Lo Green, and David Spade.  Sadly, it also features some extremely lackluster musical numbers, especially the cringe-inducing final one over the credits.  The animation work is good but the story itself is mediocre and predictable.  I wouldn't be able to watch this repeatedly but it's good for a one-time use.

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

  After seeing Bullet to the Head, I was in the mood to keep seeing dumb but flashy things.  Christy and I decided on this one, since she owned it.

Try to contain your shock here, but I have never been terribly interested in cars.  Christy, on the other hand, has actually been involved in street racing when she was in high school.  Point being when she tells me something is a good car movie, I am forced to believe her.

This is a shitty everything-else movie, however.  Paul Walker has got to be one of the worst actors to ever think "I'm too pretty to do real work."  Maybe they could have made something compelling here but then they would have had less time to show suped-up cars and girls in skimpy clothes.  Priorities.

Ben (Paul Walker) is an undercover cop assigned to infiltrate the street racing sub-culture to find out who is using their mad driving skills to rip off semis full of expensive electronics.  So he starts hitting on the sister (Jordana Brewster) of one of them and then loses his car in a race.  Because he actually sucks at racing.  However, the brother, Dom (Vin Diesel) thinks it's adorable and adopts him like a pet bunny.  Ben sucks even harder at being a cop than being a racer and it takes him the entire running time of the movie to figure out who is actually pulling off the heists.  The movie ends with absolutely no resolution but does have a kickass stunt with a train. 

I don't know if I would ever watch 2-6 but it's not bad for mindless entertainment. 

Bullet to the Head (2013)

  This is an objectively terrible movie.  That should be obvious.  In no way is this a masterful tapestry of sight and sound brought to you by accomplished thespians. 

A cop (Sung Kang) and a hitman (Sylvester Stallone) join forces in order to get revenge for their dead partners by taking out a corrupt real estate developer (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), his lawyer (Christian Slater), and his mercenary (Jason Momoa).

That's it.

Sarah Shahi is in it and she gets almost naked enough to be worth the ticket price.  Almost.

I've never been a Jason Momoa fan.  Mostly because all I've ever seen him in is Game of Thrones and he didn't really speak.  I've heard that he's actually quite articulate and intelligent but I've never seen any indications of it until this movie.  He seems like he's having a really good time on-screen, stabbing people and generally being a psycho.  It actually reminded me a little of Brandon Lee, who I never really found attractive until he smiled.  It changed his entire face. 

Don't waste your money on box office tickets for this.  It will be on TNT in about a year and you can watch it then.

Mirror Mirror (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Costumes    I did not hear anyone with anything good to say about this movie.  All I ever heard was how shitty it was.  I would have seen it anyway, because I have seen every movie Tarsem has directed but I admit I was shying away from it.

Snow White (Lily Collins) is an orphan living in the palace with her evil step-mother, the Queen (Julia Roberts).  She manages to get away from the castle and visit the town, only to discover that the Queen has driven everyone to destitution paying for her lavish lifestyle.  However, Snow sees an opportunity in the visiting Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer), who would be able to provide her an army to take back her kingdom.  The Queen also has designs on the Prince, seeing as he is young, handsome, and above all, rich.  She has her Executive Bootlicker (Nathan Lane) take the young princess into the forest and dispose of her, but Snow is saved by 7 dwarves, bandits whom the Queen had previously driven from town for being ugly.  They teach Snow that sometimes you have to fight for the things you believe in.

This is a mostly-cute take on the fairy tale that I think was unfortunately portrayed by terrible trailers.  Lily Collins' eyebrows are the only really distracting things on screen.  I thought Julia Roberts did a great job as the bitchy-yet-fun Queen and you really can't go wrong with Nathan Lane in anything.  People made a big deal about the "Bollywood" number at the end, but it's playing over the credits so if you want to turn that off, you're not going to miss anything.

The costumes were beautiful, as I expected but I don't know if it will win, seeing as the costume designer, Eiko Ishioka, died in January of 2012.  It will not be the first time they have awarded a posthumous Oscar so we'll have to see.

Warm Bodies (2013)

  I've been waiting to see this since I first saw the trailer before the last Twilight movie.  It was cute but not necessarily a "drop everything and run to the theater" kind of movie.  Definitely worth a rental, though.

R (Nicholas Hoult) is a zombie who lives at the airport.  He and his friend M (Rob Corddry) don't really do much except shuffle around and occasionally venture out in packs to hunt fresh brains in the mostly-abandoned city.  That's where R meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), part of a recovery team in the city looking for pharmaceuticals for the remaining humans.  R knows there's something special about her but doesn't know what it is, even after he eats the brain of her ex-boyfriend (Dave Franco) and absorbs all his memories.  All he knows is that he's changing.  So, instead of letting her be killed, he saves Julie and takes her to his 747, hiding her from all the other zombies.  But can a living girl and a living dead boy ever find peace?

For me, Rob Corddry stole the show completely.  His character was hilarious. I haven't seen any of Teresa Palmer's other work but she seemed pretty decent.  Looks a lot like a blond Kristen Stewart, but with talent.  There are no real surprises in the script but it's cute and funny.  It's a decent date movie, if you're a little twisted.