Reviews

It's really hard to not like something with as much cultural appreciation as this, but I feel it's a bit overrated. The story is okay, and it's funny, but it's like a parody of something that isn't worth parodying. I still think the cast was good, with my favorite being Andre The Giant. The Dread Pirate Roberts plot line was awesome, and the swordplay was impressive. But it's not really a movie that I can get anything out of. Maybe this was a new concept when it first came out, but this horse has now been ridden into the ground, and that's all there is to it. (I expect it to get remade in a year or two because that's the natural order of things.)

The Coen Brothers are extremely good at what they do, and it shows. I've been meaning to watch this all year and finally did, but no matter. I didn't expect the accents to be so strong, the story to be so intricate and the mercy to be so absent. Well, they aren't known for being reluctant when it comes to violence, but geez. Anyways, I can compare this to "Identity" in terms of uniqueness and appeal, and since I don't think either of those movies could be duplicated. William H. Macy is good as a desperate dolt, Steve Buscemi is kind of too crazy for me, but the real star is Frances McDormand. She wore her belly with pride and spoke with such confidence and style that you couldn't help but love her. The shock ending wasn't as much of a shock as I was hoping, but it didn't hurt the movie at all.

I was working at the movies when this came out so I remembered bits and pieces of it, but didn't ever watch it in full. (Since it was only in theaters for a few weeks.) But I really like the premise of the movie. In the same way that "Tropic Thunder" made fun of war films, this made fun of war itself, or at least the branches. I mean, George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, and Jeff frickin' Bridges, together. The cast is all amazing, and the plot is just weird enough to work. I expected this to be a tale of a journalist who gets a little bit embellishment-happy, but nope. It's totally based on some real things, and that's something that I enjoyed immensely.

So, if you were to take the bast-rd offspring of "Kick-Ass" and "Defendor" and kill it and use the corpse as a play toy for your children, you might be close to understanding this film. It takes the "comic-book-turned-movie" parts of Kick-Ass and the "normal-guy-fighting-evil" parts of Defendor and just adulterates the ish out of them both. Rainn Wilson's character is a literal nutcase who somehow is made out to be the good guy, Ellen Page is a psychopath/murderer who rapes Wilson, and Liv Tyler was in this movie too. If you take five minutes to think about what happened in the movie, you'll quickly realize how stupid everything is. A cop goes missing and nobody notices? The people in the movie line see Wilson change from himself to The Crimson Bolt and don't bother to report him. He also murders a guy in cold blood and people cheer for him. I'm pretty ashamed that I was looking forward to this.

If you like period pieces, this movie is for you. It might not be 100% accurate, but with a great cast and tons of enjoyability, it will be worth a watching or two. Christan Bale is amazing as Purvis, and Johnny Deep has an amazing amount of charm as John Dillinger. Some of the other characters from Channing Tatum's tiny part to Marion Cotillard were good, but the movie was of course primarily about Dillinger. It stays to to the best parts of the story too, like Dillinger's escape from Holley's jail and the cabin shootout. I could see this being hard for people who aren't interested in history to watch, but the action might be able to capture their attention again. And the bluegrass music is to die for.

Now, this is a TV movie, so it's given certain graces like having a limited audience and unsurprising expectations of mediocrity, so I can't belittle it too much. But it's just so thrown together and sloppy. Melissa Joan Hart of "Sabrina" fame starts off with an abysmal perm, and of course she's a struggling artist who waitresses part-time. But then it's all aboard the train to Crazyville. Somehow her parents believe her and not the loony man she brought. The guy (Mario Lopez) then decides that it would be a good idea to make her family fall in love with him. The big reveal is when he fake proposes to her (which he was originally was going to do to his girlfriend when he was kidnapped). I definitely can't say it's that bad; it's just weird five ways to Friday and shouldn't be taken too seriously.

For every sport there's surely a movie, and that's pretty cool. This movie has the typical "child wants to do something that parents don't approve of" plot so I can't really say it's anything new, but it is well-made and has a good cast. Ellen Page is the apex of faux high school actresses, but she gives up here "Juno" snark for actual passion (which is quite ironic as Alia Shawkat's character is named "Pash"). The roller derby is fun to watch, especially with Jimmy Fallon as the announcer. I was kinda ticked to see another movie about beauty pageants, but oh well. Marcia Gay Harden was very good as a mother who wants her kids to be like she was, but I just didn't feel any love between her and Page. Overall, it's an interesting movie but I wouldn't really want to watch it again.

It confuses me why people keep making movies sometimes. I thought the whole point of making a movie was to tell people a story that they really want to hear in a way that's both interesting and enjoyable. And according to those two criteria, this comes up short. It's an exploration into the life of an empty-nested mother whose son somehow is made to feel guilty about going to a good school far away from school to become a budding inventor. And it really didn't need to be told. Seth Rogen manages to be somewhat enjoyable but lacked his normal crazy side. Barbra Streisand swore, so that was nice. However, it's an exceptionally boring movie with a /really/ disturbing "old lovers names" scene at the end. But hey, maybe you want to watch Streisand eat a 50 oz steak. I won't judge you.

In the same way that "Avatar" was visually amazing but had a flimsy plot, this was visually stunning but left me bored. But I must give credit where credit is due. Ang Lee has some fantastic shots in the movie: Pi underwater while the ship sank; the bio-luminescent algae and the whale; those effing meerkats. I assumed that this movie was going to be primarily about Pi and the tiger, but there was a whole other religious part of the movie that wasn't advertised at all. And while it is based on a book, you've still gotta be accommodating to people who haven't read the book. Old Pi (who was awesomely in "Slumdog Millionaire") converts a writer to several religions by telling the writer his life story, which sure I guess could happen but it's hardly an interesting idea for half of the movie. So despite the non-lifeboat parts, it's a beautiful movie, and maybe you'll like it more than I did.

PS: The fact that Pi's eyes remain white was the most annoying aspect of the movie.

My love for this movie probably has no upper limit. It has a wonderfully original plot, a fantastic cast, and too many memorable lines. I've loved Emma Stone since Superbad, and she is just amazing in this role. Her casting video was the opening webcam monologue, and you just instantly know that she will be great at it. Amanda Bynes is hilarious and /just/ annoying enough to sympathize with. The grownups (Thomas Hayden Church, Lisa Kudrow, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Malcolm McDowell) are all funny and work well together, but my favorite are Olive's parents by far. Honestly my only complaint is that in one scene, Kudrow says "godd-mn sh-t" close to ten times to avoid an "R" rating, but to me it seems entirely counter-productive. It's either you cut back on all the swear words or you don't and go with an "R" rating. Or at least include an unrated cut with the f-bombs in it. But it's still a great movie which I would recommend anytime.

Maybe it's just me, but for every movie, I expect a minimum amount of things to happen; a lower threshold of scenes which makes it qualify as a 'film'. It might be seven, it might be twenty. But in any case, this movie only had two scenes: the first one when everyone thinks there's a mole and the second one where they find a mole. There's no climax or crescendo, and there isn't any exciting car chases or shootouts. For the life of me I couldn't keep track of the two dozen characters, all of whom seemed unimportant. Despite the conglomerate of great actors, there was nothing to be gotten out of this movie. As I've said before "based on a true story" is not a good enough excuse to make a crappy movie.

(PS: At one point, Gary Oldman takes out some Mentos and eats them. What a great scene.)

Sure, this is different, but that certainly doesn't make it good. Philip K. Dick seems like a decent guy, and quite a few of his books/novellas have been turned into movies, but this was just stupid. How am I supposed to believe in a costume that changes several times a second when Keanu Reeves eats without there being a mouth-hole? There's nothing new about a big pharma company which is secretly supplying the drugs which it seems to be against; all this movie did was add a predictable plot twist to it and a whole bunch of crazy ish. But I really liked the three main guys. Woody Harrelson, Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr. were fantastic together. Winona Ryder was okay but sadly I'm pretty sure this movie doesn't pass the Bechdel test. There wasn't really much to like about this.

I will admit, there were a few shots that were simply awesome. Climbing out of the TV camera and the mention of the white perspective lines come to mind first, but I'm sure there's one or two more. (Oh, and the very end where the elevator scene is duplicated.) But as a whole this was just unwatchable. It's an embarrassingly terrible attempt to make a movie about dream worlds. Full of shameful stereotypes like "fat man who has to eat a lot" and "business woman who secretly has a sexy alter ego", it's a mess of a plot and extremely hard to follow. "Inception" might have borrowed some parts of it like the mirror part and the thematic elements of dream-weaving, but these are two different movies. Pretty much everything about this was painful to watch (including the unnecessary nudity) and I just want to forget about it. Blah.

This is simply an excellent film. Besides the length, the only bad part to this is that David Fincher had to fabricate the friendship between Robert Graysmith and Paul Avery. It would be a much much different movie if those two had only been coworkers or had disliked each other. But aside from that, it's a fantastic film. The casting is amazing, with such names as Robert Downey Jr., John Carroll Lynch and Philip Baker Hall among others.

I know this is based on real events and all but I'm not easily scared, so I didn't find any of it frightening. But then I did watch it when I was ten or eleven so that might be the reason. It's a in-depth look at a psychologically off-kilter time, and I highly recommend it.

I think the main downfall of this movie is that the entire plot is revealed in the first five minutes of it (as well as the plot synopsis). John Hillcoat also directed "Lawless" which was a pretty good movie but since it was based on real events it doesn't matter if it was predictable. This wasn't allowed the same graces. Danny Huston's voice was really the only reason I kept watching it. Guy Pierce was decent, Richard Wilson was awful snivelly, and Ray Winstone was not very threatening, though I did appreciate him standing up for Mike. The other main villain (whose character name I don't remember) was too demented and I really felt sorry for him rather than disliking him. This didn't bring anything to the "aus-western" genre except for the whole "which brother is more important" thing.

I think the best way for this to be better would be to reveal the proposition at the very end instead of right away. It wouldn't be a twist ending as much as something worth waiting for.

George Clooney seems like a cool guy, but he didn't choose a very good topic for a movie. The very definition of politics is doing whatever you need to to come out on top, and nobody is surprised that it's what this movie is about. Oh, somebody had an affair? Somebody went behind their coworkers' backs? Eh, just a day in the life of a politician. It was honestly a very boring and predictable plot and the "drama" of the movie was incredibly forced and unnatural. At one point Ryan Gosling invited Evan Rachel Wood into his office, gives her a piece of paper he wrote on, asks for it back and tells her to leave. How can any of that be considered important to any part of the movie? *sigh* It had a good cast, but very little else was memorable.

This movie is essentially a boring man's take on what interesting lives are like. Zach Braff plays Andrew Largeman (get it? because he's so big on the inside) who accidentally handicaps his mother and becomes estranged from his family. He's on all sorts of uppers and living as an actor in LA. He's back for his mother's funeral and meets a compulsive liar Sam (Natalie Portman) and they fall in love after four days. They go to a hole in the earth and the groundskeeper tells them to explore "the infinite abyss" (get it? because life is infinite and ish) and they hang out in an abandoned mansion and go to drug deals and probably do more things but I've blocked them out. Being honest, there is nothing noteworthy about this movie aside from Natalie Portman being cute all the time. It's indie soundtrack and attempts at meaningfulness leaves me hoping that Braff doesn't try to make another movie.

It's risky to say anything about about Stanley Kubrick because he's such a well-respected director, so I won't say that much. As a movie, it's really boring and hard to sympathize or care about the Marines (but maybe Kubrick wanted that). R. Lee Ermey was fantastic and completely in form, while none of the recruits were interesting enough to pay attention to. (Including Pyle, who was not cut out for the Marines anyway.) The movie had two halves which seemed connected like the bread of a PB&J, but without the enjoyability of a sandwich. But I was a huge fan of the opening scene. I feel like I could be a Army "barber" if I needed to. The low-budget aspects were refreshing, but I just didn't like it much.