The title Cowboys and Aliens suggests a Western/Sci-Fi mash-up romp. With a cast including Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, Olivia Wilde and Sam Rockwell and directed by Jon Favreau (the man behind the Iron Man movies) this should have been a slam-dunk. It is not. Cowboys and Aliens is an amazingly dull and absolutely humorless mess of a movie. Continue reading
The last of this summer’s superhero movies is its best. I know I was unreserved in my praise for Thor, but Captain America noses it out to be the best superhero movie in a summer of very good superhero movies. (Even the low man on the list Green Lantern isn’t outright terrible.) Captain America is a snappy as Iron Man but with an added dash of war movie and Indiana Jones adventure. It is a fun and exhilarating ride with even a hint of tragedy.
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The most delightful and entertaining movie of the summer, so far, is Winnie the Pooh. It has, of course, been mostly overlooked. In part because it opened against the juggernaut that is the final Harry Potter film. The target demographics don’t quite overlap as they might have 7 Harry Potter’s ago, but then again; what demographic does Harry Potter not cover. Another reason for Winnie the Pooh’s lack of attention is sadly that it is a traditional, 2-D animated film, a creature that has not quite been driven to extinction in US cinemas but is certainly in the endangered species list. The decreasing frequency and increasing irrelevance of animated movies saddens me, and occasionally causes me to champion movies that aren’t actually very good just because I want more traditionally animated films (Hello, The Princess and the Frog). This is not the case with Winnie the Pooh. The characters that have charmed people for 80 or so years are captured here as well as they ever have been on film. Winnie the Pooh is a perfect children’s movie, and like the best children’s movies is not just for kids, but is enjoyable by all. Continue reading
After 10 years of being the dominant pop culture phenomenon, Harry Potter seems poised to finally fade into the background with the release of the final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. It is not going to disappear, not with the theme park and whatever is going on with Rowling’s new pottermore website, but with no significant new content on the horizon, Potter’s popularity will certainly diminish. Luckily, for Potter fans, Deathly Hallows Part 2 ends the series with a suitable bang. Continue reading
Horrible Bosses is not a great movie, especially not in the sense of being large. It is a small movie. There are few big moments or big scenes or big laughs. It stays on fairly even keel from most of it’s run time. That does not mean that it is not entertaining. Horrible Bosses is entertaining throughout. While the plot is not terrific, the excellent cast keeps the movie funny and enjoyable.
Three friends, played by Charlie Day, Jason Bateman and Jason Sudeikis, decide they hate their bosses and feeling trapped in their current jobs plot to have their bosses killed. So they try to hire someone to kill their bosses for them. There isn’t much else too it. Most of the humor comes from characters, not gross out situations like many other R-rated comedies. Fortunately the characters, and especially the actors that play them carry it well.
Bateman, Sudeikis and Day are mostly known as television guys, but they are always funny and underrated. Bateman, the glue that held the best TV show of the last decade, Arrested Development, together, plays a man stymied in his climb up the corporate ladder. Sudeikis, an underrated SNL guy, is a womanizer upset with the son who took over the family business and Charlie Day, possibly the funniest guy currently on TV, is a dental assistant and registered sex offender. The three work really well together, their friendship never feels forced on screen. Just as good as our trio of heroes are, their bosses are at least as good. Kevin Spacey is hysterically evil, Colin Farrell is just about as terrible and useless as a person gets and Jennifer Aniston is great as a sexually rapacious dentist. And there is Jamie Foxx’s hilarious turn as the trio’s “murder consultant.” No one turns in a truly great performance, but everyone is funny.
This is not a movie to inspire much of a strong reaction from the viewer. The humor comes less out of the murderous set-up and more from the amusing interactions among the characters. Which is why it is important that this film has a cast full of great comedians. With a few exceptions, like an incident with an epipen, Horrible Bosses doesn’t rise much above being humorous or amusing, but the stellar cast keeps the movie from being forgettable.
I sit here typing this review in stunned amazement. At 25 years old, I would say my tastes are pretty well developed at this point. Sure, I’m up for trying something new, but I know what I like and I know how to where to get it. Which is why I am so amazed to find something like Flash Gordon. I stumbled unawares upon Flash Gordon, no foreknowledge, no familiarity at all. That should not be possible. I am a greedy devourer of 70’s and 80’s science fiction and fantasy movies. I love old comics. I love cheesy, goofy, campy films from any era. If you know of a movie with a cult following, I am likely a member of that cult. Flash Gordon is not only all of those things; it is the epitome of them. Somehow, I had no awareness its existence despite it practically being the nexus around which my tastes revolve. I love science fiction and fantasy movies from the 70’s and 80’s. No matter how much work was put into making it look real, they all look cheesy. No matter how they are dressed up, all of these old fantasies (which even the science fiction movies are) still look like childish imaginings. Flash Gordon, though, never attempts to seem real, it fully embraces the unreality of its world and is all the better for it. A haphazard mix of fantasy and science fiction, an origin in the pulps and comic strips, a gleeful disregard for anything even resembling sanity, Flash Gordon has nearly everything I could want in a movie. Continue reading
Green Lantern Review
Green Lantern is about 5 years too late to the superhero movie party. Back when viewers were suffering through Daredevil, Catwoman, Fantastic 4, and Ang Lee’s Hulk (seriously, just because you like his movie about gay cowboys doesn’t make Hulk not a turd) Green Lantern would have seemed pretty good. It treats its subject with great, even undue, respect and is reasonably well acted. Unfortunately, in this post-Nolan Batman, post Iron Man landscape Green Lantern just isn’t up to par. Continue reading
Super 8 was certainly a pleasant surprise. Going in I had no expectations; before the release I’d barely heard of it. I had heard the name J.J. Abrams and before this I was wholly indifferent to his work. I liked Star Trek but not Cloverfield and I absolutely hated Lost. Then I read reviews of Super 8 that compared it favorable to Spielberg’s output from the 70’s and 80’s and I knew I had to go see it. Jaws, E.T, The Goonies(which I know doesn’t quite count, but close enough), those were the movies I grew up with, wearing out the VHS tapes with repeated viewings; if Super 8 could manage to evoke similar feelings then it was a must see. Super 8 did not disappoint. Though it is comparable to those movies it is more than a nostalgic throwback, it takes the themes and style from movies like E.T and Jaws, but is definitely its own story. For better or worse, Super 8 is a modern take on the themes from those classics, and while not perfect, it is eminently entertaining. Super 8 is likely the best movie of the summer. Continue reading
Much like the previous X-Men movies, X-Men: First Class seizes an overlarge portion of the X-Men mythos and struggles valiantly to weave it into a coherent story. This is no easy task; much of the X-Men’s history is poorly conceived, discordant and just plain contradictory. First Class, though, manages better than the previous entries did to create a coherent film. Still, it tries to do much more than it has the time or the material to. Continue reading
I was hoping to have a review of X-Men: First Class or Super 8 for today, but I did not end up seeing them as soon as I would have liked. (I have seen both now, reviews are forthcoming.) So instead, I decided to write a review of my favorite movie, Porco Rosso. 
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