Quick Review – The Muppets

Posted in movies by - Dec 04, 2011
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The basic premise couldn’t be more believable. The Muppets are no longer famous, and their legacy is in the hands of mercenaries who don’t have much regard for it beyond its ability to spin cash. This rubs a superfan the wrong way. This superfan’s enthusiasm becomes the catalyst to reuniting the gang and reclaiming their tarnished fame.

This premise is believable largely because it’s true. The Muppets, while always objects of GenX nostalgia, had stopped being relevant to anyone too old for Sesame Street. Superfan Jason Segel did begin scheming to get the team back together. This movie is the result …

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Quick Review – Breaking Dawn

Posted in Uncategorized by - Nov 23, 2011
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Make no mistake, ‘Twilight’ is porn. Furthermore, it’s the worst kind of porn. It’s bummer porn. It’s porn where no one gets busy for years, and when they finally do, it has horrible, life-changing consequences. It’s the kind of porn where a woman gets pregnant on her wedding night and the fetus is trying to kill her before she gets back from the honeymoon.

I didn’t read any of the books, so everything I know about this universe comes from the first movie and this one. From what I can gather, life is very boring in Forks, despite the fact that …

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Jack & Jill.Wow.

Posted in Uncategorized by - Nov 23, 2011
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I have a well-documented appreciation for bad movies, and this one was getting a 0 on Rotten Tomatoes for a good while when I got to it. I thought my expectations were screwed down low enough, but even I was baffled at the severity of this movie’s suck.

I could tell you how misogynistic Sandler’s portrayal of Jill is. I could tell you how painful it is to watch Al Pacino phone in the ridiculous part they wrote for him. I could tell you about how ugly the treatment of Mexicans is, or how unsettling the wall-to-wall product placement was for …

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Stupidly beautiful time-lapse video

Posted in Uncategorized by - Nov 13, 2011
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Saw this on Gizmodo. Liked it. Shared it. Fullscreen it and enjoy.

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Quick Review – Moneyball

Posted in movies by - Nov 13, 2011
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No matter what you’ve heard, this movie is not about baseball. There’s baseball in it, of course. A lot of baseball. This movie, however, is about Brad Pitt’s face. It’s about his face looking smug, looking nervous, looking exasperated. I’m not sure I can blame the director, as Pitt is an expensive hire and he has the superpower of not looking like ass when blown up to 40 feet high. Also the script is about statistics even more than it’s about baseball, and statistics are cinematic poison. No one wants to watch spreadsheets on the big screen. So, you make …

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Quick Review – Tower Heist

Posted in Uncategorized by - Nov 09, 2011
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I am a child of the 80s, and that means I can remember when Eddie Murphy was the funniest man alive. I can remember when he was a teenager on SNL, when he was Axel Foley on the big screen. I knew kids who had his stand-up films memorized. I also remember when Eddie took a long vacation from funny. The vacation was so long I don’t think we expected him back. The main reason I bought a ticket to ‘Tower Heist’ was to see if funny Eddie was back.

He is, more or less. He might be rehashing his own …

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Quick Review – Drive

Posted in movies by - Nov 03, 2011
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Drive is the best Michael Mann movie I’ve seen in a long time, and I mean that with deep affection. For a moment, deep in the Reagan era, Michael Mann’s aesthetic owned our imaginations. Soulful gazing at the horizon, rain-slicked streets, meditative shots of city lights bouncing off a car’s hood. Add in a moody but approachable pop soundtrack and you’ve got magic. The look and deliberate pacing of projects like Miami Vice and Thief were emulated everywhere – music videos, commercials, the lot.

Nicholas Winding Refn has meticulously and reverently lifted that formula and made an only-so-slightly update for modern …

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Quick Review – 50/50

Posted in movies by - Nov 03, 2011
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First things first. Vancouver, we see you. We know you aren’t Seattle. We see your Grouse Mountain, we see your rows upon rows of blue-glass future-condos. The jig is up. It’s time for you to filmically impersonate a different city. Try Portland. We hate them.

’50/50′ mostly works, and that’s no small feat. A healthy young man’s surprise cancer diagnosis and subsequent attempts to get sex is a tough pitch for a mainstream studio comedy. Somehow, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt manages to make the unfortunate protagonist soulful and bewildered without making him tragic.

As a movie about cancer, it’s refreshingly effervescent and loose. As …

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Quick Review – Ides of March

Posted in movies by - Oct 27, 2011
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It’s fun to watch the scenery get chewed, and nobody chews scene like Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman. George Clooney and Ryan Gosling are both compelling straight-man characters to swirl madness around. I should probably love it, but this is a very well-crafted movie with a slew of good performances that somehow doesn’t add up to anything.

Here’s the problem. I can’t get it up for Mr. Smith goes to Washington anymore. The film’s final act relies on your ability to be disillusioned by the clay feet of political figures, and I can’t play along. Of course there are clay …

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Quick Review – Paranormal Activity 3

Posted in Uncategorized by - Oct 27, 2011
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I was on my way to watch Moneyball, I swear. Traffic intervened, and I was late. I didn’t really want to watch PA3, but I also didn’t want to admit defeat and head for home. 5 dollar movie night is only once a week. I bought the ticket.

This series is mostly about things not happening. It’s a videographer’s idea of horror, where the primary action is scrubbing through tapes of people sleeping waiting to see something creepy. There’s a sort of cynical math in bad genre pictures – all you have to do to force people to jump is to …

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