Getting up to speed

I will not have time to write a full review for all of the movies that I have seen since I last updated (before I went overseas), so I will be writing one sentence reviews of them all.

The Good Shepherd:  3/5, A pretty standard production, not blown away by anything, the story was not as gripping as I expected/wanted.

21:  2/5, I suppose Kevin Spacey needs some money, which is why he chose to star in this.

88 Minutes:  2/5, about 66 minutes too long.  Pacino needs money, too, apparently.

Penelope:  3/5, a cute story, ok performances, nothing particularly outstanding

Kung Fu Panda:  2/5, Computer animation isn’t enough, let’s get some real characters in the voices and script.

Dr. No:  3/5, not the best Bond, not the worst, a bit brief and unmotivated, but you have to start somewhere.

Pink Panther: 4/5, Peter Sellers is, as always, fantastic.

Bourne Identity: 3/5, there are better spy movies out there, but this was pretty original, does not do the book justice.

Austin Powers 1: 3/5; 2: 3/5; 3: 2/5, This is a trilogy that has not worn well with time.  And the third one didn’t even do well in it’s own time.  Also, I think that my not being in middle school may have had something to do with it being just ok, and not raucously funny.

Departed: 5/5, Fantastic movie on all accounts.  So good I went back and watched it 3 days later and was still blown away by it.

The Bunker:  5/5, a fantastic performance by Anthony Hopkins as Hitler

Raising Arizona: 4/5, a very good Coen brothers film, funny and fast.

Fido:  4/5, A good zombie comedy, with absolutely beautiful design and color choices.

Lars and the Real Girl:  5/5, fantastic performances and story.  Touching and thoughtful.

Brick:  5/5, a high school film noir that is both intriguing and beautiful.

Be Kind, Rewind:  4/5, a good movie, but the movies that they film overshadow the actual plot, pretty standard Gondry, I suppose.

Conspiracy:  4/5, great performances, a movie about a discussion that could have changed the world.

28 Days Later: 4/5, a good zombie movie that takes an honest look at how people will react if the world falls apart.

28 Weeks Later: 2/5, took all the thoughtfulness of 28 Days Later and threw it out the window in favor of standard zombie fare.

From Hell (graphic novel):  5/5, Allan Moore provides a fantastic story, that is made all the better by the 50 pages of endnotes from his research

1776 (book):  3/5, a brief, superficial look at the revolutionary war.

God of Small Things (book): 5/5, I wouldn’t normally like books that juggle time, but it is an engaging story with beautiful language, that trumps a rather trite author’s tool.

Maurice Maeterlinck (book):  4/5, interesting, but pretentious.

Hang on…

I was on vacation and then work started up again, I’m keeping records of what I need to write about and so I will be trying to catch up at some point.

 

In the meantime, I have been watching Carnivale and I really want Tim DeKay to play the Green Lantern (Hal Jordan version) in a movie.

 

How do I go about making this happen?

Batman: Gotham Knight, 3/5

I love Batman.  Who doesn’t?  A friend and I were actually discussing Shoot ‘Em Up, when she hit the reason why everyone likes Batman.  Everyone likes to believe that deep down inside there lies the mettle to be something incredible, someone just needs to be pushed far enough.  And we’re not talking incredible like reciting pi out to one hundred places or being able to whip up a really great meringue with only heavy cream and cumin in the house.  I’m talking about going to the ends of the earth to train and then going out every night to protect the city you love.  There are a number of heroes that have that anger and drive to them:  Batman, Punisher, Daredevil.  Generally in their history there is a loss of family.  My friend said, “It really only takes a good dead family story to sell me,” and I (almost) completely agree, because it resonates with that primal hero or villain in each of us.  The part of us that would go batshit nuts and find justice and vengeance.  The part of us that says, “I don’t need superpowers to be a hero, I have stamina and drive (and dead loved ones).”  The Batman in each of us.

That said, I am a sucker for Batman.  I watched the Animated series as a kid and read the comics.  So Gotham Knight came out, and, in my blind enthusiasm for the upcoming Dark Knight, I went out and got the two disc special edition (I haven’t looked at the special features, after all, this is a movie review, not a DVD review).

What Gotham Knight is, if you don’t know, is six Batman stories loosely connected and put on one DVD.  One of the most striking things about this movie was the range of the stories.  Some are told with Batman almost not speaking at all.  Some are told from Bruce Wayne’s perspective.  Some have action, some have emotion.  

Of the six stories, my favorite was the first one, “Have I got a story for you,” which is the story of Batman chasing a villain across the city, as told by 3 kids who saw pieces of it.  Each one saw Batman as a wholly different creature.  The story was not only engaging, but the artwork was beautiful.  Not in the traditional comic book sense, but it reminded me of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, which was one of the first graphic novels I read with Batman and which, to this day, stands out in my mind as a gritty, dark, Batman-esque world in which he should function.  

The second one, “Crossfire,” was a pretty standard story, reminding me of a series of Spider-Man comics called Tangled Web where we see the effects of Spider-Man’s action on the normal people of New York.  Here it was the effects of Batman on two Gotham police officers.

The third story was my least favorite for a number of reasons.  One of the strengths of the “Anime” style in my view is the ability to create really muscular masked heroes.  One of the downfalls is the propensity to create weedy looking normal people.  We meet Bruce Wayne in this one and, for some reason, he has a huge nose and a terrible underbite.  He looks more like Cowboy Bebop than Batman.  Couple that with the fact that the story revolves around the gadgets and one should see why I didn’t like it.  Sure, Batman has toys.  He has a utility belt.  But he also has guts and I don’t want to see a story about his toys.  I am willing to bet that there were people who got suckered in by this one because of the ending, showing compassion, &c., but I would also like to point out that Batman is a detective first and foremost, so he would have known better in the first place, rather than making the mistake that causes the sappy ending.

The fourth one, “In Darkness Dwells,” had a mediocre story, but the artwork was amazing.  Batman goes against Killer Croc at one point and it was like Croc had crawled straight out of a Mike Mignola comic.  Also it featured the first rendition of Scarecrow that I have ever found interesting or vaguely intimidating.  

The fifth one was another mediocre one, mitigated by a slightly interesting mingling of flashback.

The final one was a good chase story with a much better Wayne than the third story, and I was excited to see the appearance of DC mercenary mainstay Deadshot.  It was an interesting chase, and I would watch it again, but it did not blow my socks off.

One of the best parts about this movie, however was the fact that Kevin Conroy played Batman.  Conroy started playing Batman in 1992 for the Animated Series (one of the best animated shows of my time), having never read anything about Batman before.  The plot was explained to him and he, a Shakespearian actor, says “Oh, Hamlet,” and had no trouble playing the part.  They were going to cast a younger man for Wayne but he also convinced them to use his voice and the split between Batman and Wayne is amazing.  Conroy has been playing Batman continuously since 1992 and, for my generation, is the voice of Batman.  You can hear that he has aged since the heyday, but it is still a very good performance.

Do not believe the claim that this is the first animated Batman movie to get a PG-13 rating.  The Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker movie got a PG-13 rating until they re-edited it.  The PG-13 version was later released as a Director’s Cut (and it is pretty good, it’s the only Batman Beyond that I’ve seen and it reminded me a little of the story from Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns).

Please pardon the fact that I overly nerded out on this review.

Overall:  An interesting concept, better than the Animatrix, however I wasn’t blown away by it.  The first and last ones are probably the strongest and I hated the third one.  I am also slightly biased against anime.  Three out of five, I liked it.

Iron Man 5/5

  Iron Man.  As an unabashed comic book fan, I have never particularly liked the character of Iron Man.  I suppose I’ve never really known much about him, but I have never really liked him.  I did like the movie though.  Enough to make me go back and read some Iron Man comics.

Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr. (because no one else would be able to play him), is a genius weapons designer and a millionaire playboy.  He is on a trip to Afghanistan to show the new missile, the Jericho.  His convoy is attacked (by Stark weapons) and he is injured and taken hostage.  He is forced to build a Jericho missile for some terrorists, instead, he builds a suit out of missile scraps and uses it to escape.  Additionally, he has an electromagnet implanted in his chest to make sure the shrapnel from the attack does not go any further into his heart.

Upon coming home, he decides it is time to get out of the weapons business.  He mopes and then starts building a new suit.  Meanwhile, the terrorists are salvaging his original suit.

Granted, I am biased because I like comic book movies, but this movie was fantastic.  Everything was well thought out.  The attention to detail and performances were stunning.  Robert Downey Jr. was born to play Tony Stark.  Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s assistant, Pepper Potts, was believable, both in her professionalism and her crush on Stark.  Jeff Bridges as Stark Enterprise’s CEO was down to earth.  Everything from the creation of the first suit to the final battle was a joy (and the creation of the suit was much more detailed than the debacle in Spider-Man 1 where it looks like all of a sudden he ran some gloves through some spider webs).

The technology in the movie is jaw-dropping, everything in Stark’s house is so pretty and functional that it was, to borrow a phrase from Boing-Boing, aspirational porn.  It is a shame, however that Stark runs Dell computers.  I guess he has overclocked all of the hardware (and it looked like he’s running Ubuntu or Linux as his OS).

Of all the Marvel movies, this is probably my second favorite (Punisher being the first) and it is close to being as good as Batman Begins.  This is a must-see for anyone who is even vaguely interested in super-heroes, and an ought-to-see for everyone else.  Stay after the credits for a bonus scene.  Also, James Rhodes takes on the costume in the comics to become War Machine.  So when he looks at the Mark II suit and says “later,” I swooned (masculinely).  That’s the kind of forethought and continuity I want in my comic book movies.

Overall:  Go see it.  Fantastic. 5 out of 5, “loved it”

Meet the Robinsons 3/5

Nerdy, genius orphan, Lewis wants a family.  He also wants to invent.  That is the quick and dirty plot synopsis.  How, you ask, then does the future come into it?  Lewis creates a memory jogger in order to remember his mother so he can find her.  He enters it into a science fair where he is approached by a boy from the future who says that a man in a bowler hat is going to try and steal the memory jogger.  A man in a bowler hat sabotages the memory jogger.  Lewis, despondent, starts to give up on his dream of inventing until Wilbur from the future tries to cheer him up, which makes Lewis ask Wilbur to prove he is from the future.  And so on.

If I go any further into the plot I think I will reveal too much.  Very soon after he goes into the future the plot goes into overdrive and it all moves very quickly.

This was a cute movie, pretty standard in terms of modern Disney fare.  This is not a Lion King or an Aladdin.  This is definitely not a Toy Story or Incredibles.  There were plenty of funny moments and I enjoyed it, however it did not seem as fully fleshed out as some of the other movies of this type, and the ending was predictable.  It, as might be expected, did tend towards the schmaltzy, and tried very hard to set up some parallels between Lewis and Walt Disney.

The best part of this movie was the villain.  The Man in the Bowler Hat was fantastic, both in appearance, movement, and voice.  I laughed out loud many times at his scenes.  He was a saving grace of this movie.

Overall:  It might be worth a rental, certainly for the Man in the Bowler hat, but I think it would be most enjoyable to watch with kids.  I would take this on a babysitting job if I still babysat.  3 out of 5 stars, I liked it.