city of ember

my buddy aaron read the book that this movie is based on and said it was really good, so i thought i would try out the movie. it turns out that its a pretty fun one. the premise is that people had to flee the surface of the earth for some reason and they built an underground city to stay safe. the plan was that humanity had to live there 200 years before they could return to the surface in safety. well, somewhere along the way the people forgot about the surface and just grew accustomed to living in this underground city. the two hundred years have passed and everything in the city is falling apart and the power is starting to go out. fortunately, as always happens in these family movies, there just so happens to be three kids who find out the truth and must defy the adults who dont believe them. they find the instructions for how to return to the surface and must complete, in great 'goonies' style, a few puzzles in order to get what they are looking for. the puzzles and contraptions themselves are a bit of fun, and the lighthearted quality to the whole film makes it a decent movie. not entirely sure what bill murray is doing slumming in this movie as the city mayor, but the rest of the film does alright. its thoroughly predictable from the first five minutes, but its a fun ride. especially the water ride!

leatherheads

this romantic comedy, directed by george clooney, is set in the 30's and follows the rise of pro football from a fringe league to it being the huge sport we know and love. we start off with clooney as the footballer who loves the game but due to lack of money, must face the fact that the league he plays for is going out of business. he comes up with a plan: to get a college football war hero, played by jim krasinski, to give up his future as a lawyer, and instead join his football team- bringing his thousands of fans with him. also mixed up in the story is a newspaper reporte, renee zellweger, trying to get to the bottom of the shady details about krasinski's war hero background. of course, both players fall for the girl as she has to decide what to do about the truth she has found. the 30's style is really great in this film, from the footballer's uniforms to the crazy hats the women wear. filled with the ragtime style music of the time, the whole movie has a really playful feel that draws you in and allows you to be sucked in by clooney's suave charms, and krasinski's simple charms. some of the scenes are infectious fun, such as when the two of the guys get into fisticuffs for the girl, and most of the scenes on the football field. this one is an all around fun time!

texas chainsaw massacre: the beginning

really? i knew not to expect too much, but this thing is ridiculous! what a load of trash this movie is. this one is meant to be a prequel to the remake of the original (confusing, i know). i really enjoyed the remake, so i was kind of interested in this one. i though that maybe they would go into the history of the crazy family, maybe give us some motivation for the evil that they do. no such luck, instead we get a complete retelling of the first one, except this time its with new characters. and less quality. one of the plot twists from the first one is that the sheriff turns out to be one of the family members, in this movie we are shown how he gets to be the sheriff. apparently he just killed the old sheriff and took his uniform. seriously? no one would have noticed? lame. that is about as thorough as this movie gets with motivation and back story. other than about thirty seconds of where the leatherface chainsaw killer came from (wow! he was a baby found in a dumpster! amazingly original writing there, guys!), we never see any reasoning behind why this family is so messed up. nothing. and thats about what this torture porn movie adds up to: nothing.

max payne

pretty boring for the most part, but once he gets out of the water it gets pretty good. that is actually where the movie starts but then it goes back three years to fill in the back story. unfortunately the back story is pretty bland and boring, so the hour we spend getting up to where the movie began is rather lame. the back story is almost cookie cutter in its genericness: a police officer, max payne, finds his wife and daughter are killed and he turns into a bitter loner looking for the killer that got away. the whole thing involves a shady corporation that is doing evil things, and of course there has to be an experimental drug involved too, right? well, just as max payne is on the cusp of death and has to take the crazy hallucinogenic drug to survive, thats when it gets good! he starts to see valkrie demons and the sky burns red. he becomes a real bad ass and the story turns awesome. unfortunately, that only takes up the last 15 minutes of the movie. there was certainly a good movie in this story, but they just seemed to choose not to follow the good part and instead spend too much time following the wrong angle.

the wizard

i hate to say it, but this one does not hold up. at all. i remember really loving this movie back when it first came out, but watching as an adult i can see that this thing is nothing more than a paid advertisement for nintendo and its games. dont get me wrong, i love nintendo! its the only gaming systems i will play, still to this day. but when the movie is about a race to find three runaways, and the dad and brother stop for the night to play some teenage mutant ninja turtles on their nes, its pretty obvious that it was designed to sell a few games! the story follows two brothers, who happen to meet up with another wayward girl, as they run away and try to win the video game championships in california. the most famous (or is it infamous?) part of the movie comes from the encounter with a video game player who has the latest gaming technology: the power glove! its a cheesy game controller that you wear as a glove and is supposed to be able to track your movements to control your character (nintendo, never one to give up on a gimmick, finally perfected the motion controller 15 years later with the wii). the memorable scene has the player strapping on the power glove saying 'i love the power glove, its so bad.' and so is this dated movie...

american teen

i dont remember high school being quite like this...
this is a reality movie, i wouldnt call it a documentary exactly, because it plays more like a reality show on vh1 than any sort of high brow investigative film. the makers of the movie follow five high school students as they go through their senior year. each of the individuals have their own category that they fill: the cheerleader, the indie chick, the nerd, the jock, and the cool kid. we follow them through out the year as they go about their activities, each of them recording video journals and the like as the year goes on. we start to get past the cliches and find out what these people are really like. as the year goes on, there are a bunch of different situations that arise: the indie chick gets dumped right after she gives up her virginity, the cheerleader gets involved in a friend's nude photo getting put on line for the whole school to see, the jock chokes when the college recruiters come, the nerd finds a girl that then breaks his heart, etc. some of the things they deal with are universal and interesting to watch as these teens try to deal with real life, but much of it was way outside my realm of experience. i guess i had a pretty bland high school experience, so i had a hard time relating on my of the struggles that these kids went through.

the name of the rose

on paper this movie seems pretty unusual: james bond playing sherlock holmes as a monk. in reality it is actually works. we have sean connery playing a franciscan monk who is brought in to investigate a series of murders at a monastery. he, a believer in the scientific method, is challenged at every turn by the local monks feeling that he does not belong there and his methods are going against God's will. as the mystery unfolds we are shown more and more about these local monks that doesnt quite add up and its up to connery to try and find the truth, even when no one wants him to find it. connery does a good job of playing the sleuth and uncovering clues. the build up is much more interesting then the follow through, unfortunately. by the end of the movie, the answers seem awfully obvious and a bit simple. but dont let that turn you away, they do a great job with atmosphere and creating an intricate puzzle of a whodunit!

brothers bloom

this one is a pretty cool story about two brothers who are con artists. one of them wants out but the other brother wants him to stay with it for one last job. he reluctantly agrees and wachel weisz, the strangly airy millionaire, gets caught in the big mess. the adrien brody and mark roffalo do a great job as the brothers, but the real winner on display here is the script. there are so many twists and turns along the way that you forget which ones are real and which ones are part of the con. and then theres one more twist. and then one more. each of the twists are done so expertly that you dont feel cheated, but more like a magician, you are just enjoying the well pulled off trick!

flash of genius

ever wondered who invented the intermittent windshield wiper? me neither, but this film shares that story with us. turns out that the story of its inventor is actually pretty interesting. we follow kinnear's character as he sees the need and goes about inventing a solution with his family for those pesky windshield wipers. we see as he shows his idea to the ford motor company. the ford company then does what all corporations do: they take the idea and destroy the little guy. kinnear is not willing to sit back and let them steal his idea and ends up bringing the ford company to court- something unheard of at the time. well, suing a multinational corporation is no easy task and he must decide if getting credit is worth sacrificing his marriage for. this is a pretty interesting little film that is enjoyable to watch, though the real story seems to be glossed over to make way for the hollywoodization of the facts. we see the inventor as the hero and the ford company as the monolithic villain. its portrayed very black and white with no real shades of grey. granted, that might have been how it actually was, but the whole film seems too simple and cliche.

immortal

jeffry lee and i rented this one once on a random walk-through of the video store. we knew we wanted to watch a movie, but didnt exactly know what to get. often times this ends in us watching some terrible movies, but other times it can lead to some interesting finds. i'm not sure which category this one fall into...
this is a french movie, but in english (not quite sure how that works, but go with it). it starts with a strange premise that the egyptian gods all live in a floating pyramid above a big futuristic city. one of the gods is sentenced to die, but before he does, he gets to spend one day living among the mortals. he finds a host in a resistance fighter who recently (accidentally) got out of jail. there are a bunch of strange things about this movie (as if you hadnt realized all ready...), such as the unexplained girl who seems to molt like a bird and cries blue tears. well, the god/resistance fighter finds here and decides he must have sex with her. many many times. all the while there is a private detective trying to find them for some reason.
to tell you the truth, i dont really understand this one. why do they try to collect her blue tears? why do we sometimes see the resistance fighter, and other times see the bird headed god? what does the detective have to do with anything? why are some actors computer generated, while others are not? why is there a pyramid floating over a city? why all the sex?!? i'm sorry, i dont have any answers for you, and neither did this movie.

a good woman

i didnt know anything about this movie at all before we began watching it, so i had no idea what to expect. the film is set in 1930's paris and follows a woman who used to be a sort of professional mistress to wealthy men. we join up with her as she begins looking for a new target in the midst of a newlywed couple on their honeymoon. she seems to be taking a shining to the new groom, and he pays a little too much attention to her. what is the new bride to think of it all? the story plays out with an interesting twist or two along the way.. during the movie there are a couple older gentlemen who are hanging around the woman who always seem to have the wittiest things to say. i kept thinking that they sounded exactly like something oscar wilde would write. it got to the point that as we were watching i was getting really annoyed and actually said to diana 'they are totally ripping off oscar wilde!' then it dawned on me and i looked at the dvd case- turns out this movie is based on the play 'lady windermere's fan', which just so happens to be written by oscar wilde! once i figured that out i sat back and enjoyed it a lot more.

iron man 2

i was really excited to see this movie. the first one was so much fun that i was very eager to have that same level of fun again. unfortunately, that didnt quite happen. this movie picks up right after the last one and we get to see some pretty interesting stuff about the fall out from tony stark admitting that he is iron man. its an interesting choice by the people behind the film to ditch the secret identity straight off the bat. what we see is that the government is not comfortable with stark having such a powerful weapon so they try to take it away from him, and we see that some bad people with grudges against stark want to take it away from him too. the story follows stark's main competitor for weapon sales in the u.s., a guy named hammer, played with fun by sam rockwell, as he tried to take down stark while stealing all his ideas. theres a russian named 'whiplash' in there too. anyway, one of the things that made the first movie so much fun was the fact that robert downey jr. played stark with such enjoyment as stark lived with reckless abandon after getting his life back and redirecting himself into building a suit. this time we find stark as he is dying from the power source in his chest. we see him again live recklessly, but the fun is gone. sure, its meant to look like fun, with him doing whatever he wants, even becoming some sort of iron man dj? but things go south when rhodes, his best friend, takes one of his suits and gives it to the government just because he and stark got in a fight. from there the story hits all the marks it needs to, there are even some cool effects, but the thrill is gone. what had been lighthearted and carefree in the first one becomes laborious and predictable in this one. sure, there are some good moments, but over all it fell pretty flat.

star trek: nemesis

the final instalment of the next generation crew, this one is better than the last. now, that may be faint praise, considering the 9th movie, insurrection, was by far the weakest since number 5, but its still meant as a compliment. this story follows the path of a new leader coming up the ranks from the planet remus, the sister planet to romulus. he has taken control of both planets and the romulan empire, and has his sights set on earth. what makes this villan special is that he is an exact dna clone of captain picard. due to his poor health, though, the clone needs some help from his daddy dearest. jean-luc though, is reluctant to help and soon the clone's true intentions are revealed. as is true with almost all star trek films, there is a lot more talk than there is action. that is not a deal breaker with these movies, but all the constant discussion and lack of action can get a bit old. the visual effects are pretty good, they dont seem like much now (they are the equivalent of any hour long sci-fi show on the air these days), i remember them being pretty impressive when i first watched this film in the theater with my dad. thankfully, the character development in this film makes up for any action or effects shortcomings. it is great to see some real advancing of relationships between the characters. the whole movie starts with riker and troy getting married, something that had been bubbling since the first days of the tv series. we get to see data learn the role of father to a less advanced android, and we see captain picard reflect on the choices he has made in his life. as so many characters are moving on, riker and troy to helm another ship, dr. crusher to teach at starfleet academy, and data learning the value of humanity, it really feels like a fitting closure to this set of characters. it may not be the crew's best mission, but they do a great job of helping us realize that it is their last mission together. its a bit sad to see the end of another star trek crew cycle, but we are left knowing that these characters are in a better place, still ready for adventure.

the princess and the frog

disney is back at it, making hand drawn 2D animation movies. good for them! its been too long since anyone has made a movie the old fashioned way. this one follows in the hallowed foot steps of beauty and the beast, lion king, and all the other disney animated treasures.
this film follows a young girl as she grows up in new orleans with a dream to someday fulfill her beloved late father's hope to open up their own restaurant with good old cajun cooking! she is a hard worker and things start to go her way, at least until she meets up with a strange talking frog. well, the frog cons her into kissing him, hoping that will change him back into a prince. unfortunately, it does the opposite, and turns her into a frog as well! the two of them try their best to make things right and get back to being people and find friends and villains alike along their way. it being a disney movie, you can pretty well guess where the story is going, but there is some fun twists and turns that keep it enjoyable. the songs are alright, the story is alright, but over all it misses the mark a bit on being a classic. it fits well along side some of the smaller works of disney animation, but it is far from the soaring heights of disney's best. its light, mildly humorous, and sweet. but thats about it.

star trek: insurrection

having been a fan of star trek since i was little, i fondly remember the next generation films as some of my favorites. insurrection, though, i dont remember thinking it was very good. turns out i was right. the film follows the next generation crew as they try to figure out what is the real story behind the residents of a planet's relocation effort. there is, of course, some wrong doing that captain picard will not stand for and must get involved. with good reason, the situation is going against the 'prime directive' after all! all in all, its a minor outing by the crew with minimal action and character development. it really feels as if it is simply two episodes strung together. the bad guys are non threatening and boring, leaving our crew to face of against... well, no one. there really isnt that much going on in the film, other then some minor skirmishes that lead to nothing at all. f murray abraham is wasted as the bad guy, given no real showcase for his acting, and being covered up with too much makeup to really warrant a name actor in the first place! there are some nice moments between the enterprise crew, but they are mostly played for laughs. they say that the odd numbered films in the star trek series are the worst ones, and this film, which is number 9 for the series, does not contradict that theory.