Inception

Inception
Rated: PG-13
Grade: A

You ever go to a movie and it turns out to be exactly what you thought it would be. What a great day… It’s been a while.

The story line is fairly straightforward. Dude A and Dude B and Dude C try to steal from Dude D. they do this by hijacking him on a train and then going into his dreams which they built to accommodate his reality, only Dude D realizes it. So Dude’s A, B, and C runaway and Dude D catches them and I guess kills one of them off, and offers the others work by implanting an idea into Dude E. So to do that you need to enter dream state 1, and have that guy fall asleep and enter the new dream state of the dreamer dreams… blah blah blah... still reading?

It was a little convoluted. But it never really felt that way. I mean the concepts this movie uses to transition thru the angst of the central character is fairly difficult to get… it’s just complicated. You are with them, sleeping, but you can get kicked awake, and in different dreams of dreams you can get kicked out of one but not the other… its complicated! Think Matrix style complicated where they have to have a character monologue to the audience, only Inception is never forced to do that. Chris Nolan did a great job of directing the audience into concepts, surprises, and climactic moments. It was just a fun movie.

Every actor did a great job.

The action sequences were absurd. (In a good way)

The worlds created felt like home, but just a little different.

It was just really interesting.

It gets an easy A.

Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Rated: PG

Grade: C

It wasn’t that bad. It’s almost a B…

I mean you have to take into consideration this is a kid’s movie… kind of…

That’s the thing. It wasn’t really a kid’s movie. I mean the main guy was in Knocked Up and She’s Out of Your League. That’s his resume of work, and he plays the same character in all of his movies. Just an awkward nerd guy, sometimes he’s high, other times he is apparently a Sorcerer.

Anyway its origins are here:

And that’s just cool. I even made a maze a few years ago with it as the inspiration… *don’t sue me Disney.

They have an awkward tribute scene, where a mop kind of sexually assaults our protagonist. So with all that, it wasn’t that bad.

I don’t know. It feels weird. Like as I walked away from the movie I had enjoyed the little ride I had gone on. Just a little escape. The more I think about it though the more disdain I have for it.

I mean the most powerful spell in a dual is apparently shooting fireballs. Even spirit wizards apparently just shoot fireballs. If you are going to rip off a Disney wizard moment, rip off sword and the stone. I want to see Nic Cage as a freaking mouse running from a purple alligator. Also… make it look real please.

Another thing that just kind of annoyed me… Merlin. Really? !? The origin of the story was lame. Merlin trains 3 people, 2 guys and a girl. One guy gets scorned cause Monica Bellucci is just too attractive, so he makes a deal with some bad wizard person. There are throw away villains with a dragon, and again, our hero is running and throwing fire.

Just kind of a silly movie. Biggest problem is they wanted this to be like Pirates, where it appealed to everyone. They should have just picked a demographic and rolled around in their profit.

Oh well… This movie was a C for me.

Despicable Me

Despicable me
Rating: PG
Grade: F -8

Despicable me… you bastard…

This movie was horrible. I was bored and wanted to die.

Really… I wanted to die. Instead of dying I actually asked if I could leave but my wife said that she wanted to stay and see if it got better.

Remember in the horrible movie Little Nickey with Adam Sandler, where he does that voice and the facial tick the whole movie. Super annoying and the movie sucked anyway, but it sucked EVENMORE. Steve Carrel did it this movie with just his voice. His horrible fake accent takes away from every line and every moment. So since the movie starts as a 0, it moves into negative territory. (-1)

Oh cute girls that win a mean hearted guy… wait a second…

I have seen this before… literally that 2-year-old super cute girl… I have seen her before (-1):

The plot is dumb… a bad guy steals the pyramid which makes another bad guy insecure. So bad guy #2 (our star Gru), adopts kids to get into a house to steal a shrink ray to steal the moon, so that he can prove he’s the best criminal… cause his mom didn’t love him. Wait... .WAIT A MINUTE! They have a character lady, a fat woman who abuses little kids and puts them in a box for weeks at a time in this movie. She is literally a much worse person than ANY of the bad people. There is literally no resolution at all for this. (-2)

The music was awesome… seriously thru out the movie I was thinking about how I liked the mixes, the transitions. It’s the same melody or beat as in the commercial… kind of awesome. One of the first credits that rolled, (grateful it was first cause I was out of that theater fast) was Pharrell Williams. You might know of him from the Neptune’s, or N.E.R.D. or maybe because he’s freaking Pharrell Williams. This is the one and only good thing about the movie.

I cant convey how bored I was.

It felt like the whole thing was an ad to get me to go to McDonalds and get a happy meal with these little yellow Twinkie guys. There occasional slapstick humor was funny for a second. Not really like laugh out loud funny, but it made me smile. While the movie and actual characters made me want to die, that was actually a pretty big accomplishment.

I’m not kidding about the boredom or lack of laughter.

You know how sometimes you will go to a movie and an idiot is laughing behind you? well if you have never had that experience, you are probably that idiot and you might like the movie. The guy behind me and his wife sure enjoyed it. They said things like, “look its an alligator couch, HA HA HA!” or “He punched the shark, HA HA HA!”, not fake laughter mind you, real, full, hearty, laughter. So if that’s your brand of humor, enjoy.

As for the rest of the audience, including kids, there weren’t many laughs. There was a point where the 3 girls are at a dance recital, in the movie the recital starts, then they cut to Gru and its over. A kid near the front of the theater turned to his dad and loudly declared, “That dance thing was fast!” the entire audience erupted. Pure laughter. We wanted to laugh, everyone wanted to laugh… this movie sucked so bad it robbed people that WANTED to laugh of a chance to. (-5)

Also… the minions are kind of cute.. (+1)

It gets an F though!

I haven’t written numerical ratings and I don’t plan on it… lets just call this a -8 F.

With this cast it should have been an easy A.

Predators

Predators
Rated: R
Grade: B


So it’s been a while since I have seen an R rated flick. Specifically an R rated action movie so all that desensitizing I have been working on my whole life is starting to fade.

There are parts where the violence was enough to make me kind of grimace. I don’t know if I would have grimaced had I still been watching my weekly dose of violence. There is a scene where a criminal gets his spine and skull ripped out of him while he is living… the dude is a creeper and the movie does a good job of making you want bad things to happen to him. Even with that, I grimaced, the two people on my left laughed hard and the large group in front of me laughed as well. So I was left grimacing and then worrying about my safety. You know where you picture a fight in your head with all the males and make sure that, at least in your imagination, you could win.

Anyway… back to the movie.

The people are all bad in this film. There is something like 9 total people and they are all criminals. Most of them don’t even have a single redeeming quality demonstrated. Here is a large assumption, most people don’t like to think of themselves as murders or apathetic to others well-being. I mean it’s not a cognizant thing, its just there… we are naturally kind of altruistic. So the film has to overcome that.

They also have to overcome the mythology of Predators at this point. We have Predator 2, Predators vs Alien, and Predator vs Aline part 2…. The only thing that makes this a big deal. In Predators vs Alien you see that the Predator is a murdering crazy monster, but it isn't THAT bad. It can help to fight Aliens. It could be good... So it kind of developed the monster a little. Once you see past the monster, its hard to just see it as a monster again.

Also some basic questions the movie tries to answer:
How do you kill a Predator?
What kind of dog does a Predator have?
Do Predators have prejudice against other Predators or just other creatures?
Does the energy shot out of a Predator gun blow things up or just penetrate?

Questions I have:
If dropped on a gaming preserve, where the hunters are always coming, can you really win or isn’t it time to give up?
Why do Predators always strike a pose, mid fight, after people get away, any time they are on the screen…?
Was that really the role Laurence Fishburne signed up for? Also... stop flexing. When I hand someone soup I don't flex.

So yes everyone is bad. But still they don't have to communicate with each other in a way that makes no sense and seems strained; obviously the writers are trying to get to the next scene of violence.
Also... THEY ARE ALL VILLAINS!
If everyone is a true villain, I mean raping, murdering, love killing kind of person, there isn’t anyone to root for. I would say this is a spoiler but its so obvious it isn’t… they make one character seem like a scared person the whole time. So you kind of root for him only to make him for no apparent reason, while waiting for his sure death, try to murder the woman… who you care about as an audience cause she’s a woman.
Lame.

Even with all that, the movie wasn’t boring. It made no sense but in a way that made you want to see more, it had me rooting by the end it would make sense. So it provided me with hope at least that it would be fun.

So as a ride it was a B+. As a movie it was a low B.

Eclipse

Eclipse

Rating: PG-13

Grade: C

Yep I saw it. I read the books to. I’m a 28-year-old guy that has read and experienced twilight. Not only that but my wife hasn’t and doesn’t like them. This was the first time she went to any of the movies and it was at my behest. I found my self explaining little things… I would lean over and say, “he reads minds and that other chick sees the future.” Or “they feed on animals, and their eyes glow when they just ate.”

I kind of hate myself right now.

So this isn’t a first movie. Don’t go see this movie if you haven’t seen the others.

It’s slow. Even for a slow romance movie it’s slow.

You might say, “But they have vampires and wolf-shifter things… and that’s the main focus”.

The previews lie. Your girlfriend or wife lies. It’s not… not at all. Even the vampires that are building an army are doing it out of LOVE!

So I got sick of all the dramatic looks and long pauses. The vampires look longingly at each other. The wolves imprint on one another. The vampires look at the humans filled with this blood mongering that’s a little awkward and oddly similar to lust. It’s a bit odd.

The acting sucked. ---------------------- The same way a soap-opera sucks.

The dialogue sucked. ------------------- The same way the book did though.

The action sucked. ---------------------- In a much better way than the last couple movies though.

(get it… sucked… vampires… lame…)

The graphics were decent though... can't even say the sucked thing.

Charlie her dad was great. He seems to be the highlight of all 3 movies. Just a witty, down to earth, don’t-sleep-with -my-daughter-dad. He is kind of the only believable character that stands on his own.

Everyone else of course is an empty shell and as such you can relate to it. So even though the movie sucks you laugh, cause Jacob doesn’t ever have a shirt, or at the sister’s twisted rape and revenge story. Smiled, laughed, and enjoyed it… then I was bored again.

So for a grade it gets a C.

The Last Airbender

The Last Airbender
Rated: PG
Grade: C

So I placed a lot of hope on this movie. It wasn’t horrible… and those two statements that close together kind of indicate how I feel about the movie.

So here is where I’m going to make excuses for the movie.

The first movie in a trilogy has a lot of responsibility. It has to introduce all the characters. It has to explain what they can do and why. It has to introduce the world that the movie takes place in. It has to have an arc so that the movie stays interesting… really most movies have to have 3 arcs. Point is it has to do all those things while staying a movie. It’s a tall order. X-men and Superman Returns sucked at this. Spiderman, Batman Begins, and Iron man did a great job of this. This movie did this worse than any movie I have ever sat thru. The Last Airbender randomly used narration to move the story along, badly. It broke the flow of the movie… course there wasn’t really a flow at all. You learn they can bend things, cause you hear it. You learn Ang is the Avatar cause of a narrator. You learn people are in love… sorry cartoon movie, in like, thru narration. You even learn about the rebellion that is central to the entire movie (and trilogy), not by seeing, but hearing about it. The Last Airbender Failed.

Making a movie from a cartoon is rough. So many movies have failed doing this. I saw Speed Racer and really enjoyed it. I saw it in an IMAX and I was by myself in the theater. I even went out and asked for them to turn it up. The volume got turned way up.. that movie they didn’t take themselves seriously at all. It was a live animated cartoon. FLASHY lights, colors, loud music and a clear-cut good and bad!
So again… I saw that movie and no one else was there.
This is a picture of my wife at the theater today:


So it was empty…
It was normal volume and a theater that didn’t have reclining chairs… so not exactly the same awesomeness…
In a cartoon where people can control fire and there is a bison that has 6 legs and it can float/fly, it does pretty well. At times it takes itself way too seriously. Other times it handles itself perfectly. It doesn’t fail, but it isn’t fantastic.

So that brings us to the graphics. I saw this in 3D. It was good. I mean it was obvious they didn’t film it in 3D and it was all done in post, but it was done well in post. The fire looks cool and the battle scenes at the end made me giddy. It’s hard to make a bison that flies but yep, it didn’t look real, cause it isn’t real. It was good though.

The acting was horrible at the beginning and better at the end.
The pacing was horrible at the beginning and better at the end.
That’s kind of the theme of this movie.
The first hour and fifteen minutes are pretty bad.
The last thirty minutes were pretty awesome.

Giggles and glee and what not… they stop talking about what the story is about and they show it. It’s pretty cool.
So it gets a C from me.

Toy Story 3

Toy Story 3
Rated: G
Grade: A
Toy Story 3 is just a fantastic movie. It was great and fantastic. … Did I say great? Cause I want to emphasize that! It really was just a great movie. Great and fantastic!

I don’t really remember the other two movies that well… I mean I remember Woody and Buzz and a lot of the other characters. I just don’t remember the little details though that some movies rely on to really bring a trilogy together.

It’s funny how often Woody isn’t trusted in these movies though. I remember in the first one that all the toys didn’t trust him. They thought he killed Buzz. They didn’t believe him. They even unhooked his line to safety and pretty much tried to just leave him on his own to be killed by the neighbor kid. (Maybe I remember more than I give myself credit for)
This movie they don’t believe him when they are in a garbage bag by the side of the road. Every toy should ask itself, why would Woody lie? What was the motivation? WWWD?

Oh well. They all end up in a box to Sunnyside daycare and have to go thru the torment of 1 year olds playing with them. Then the story gets interesting. Just wonderfully tied together pieces of a great story to make a masterpiece. From the kid that is happy and endearing, to the villains that are corrupt and creepy, every piece has a purpose. Every scene is either causing a smile or leading you to one with craft and care. Even the monkey.

I’m pretty manly. I don’t cry that often. I think the last movie that made me tear up was “Up” by Pixar. That first ten minutes; where his wife finds out she cant have kids, and he goes to reassure his crying wife, then she dies... she freaking dies! Ten minutes in... Insert three tears. Well I was alone in that movie, so it wasn't that big a deal.

Well this movie I watched with my wife of 4 weeks and her 3 sisters. I had to make the loud pretend cough to try and wipe the tear away. I told them it almost made me cry… almost? I’m already lying… 4 weeks in.

For a movie about toys named woody and buzz, played by an anti-Mormon dude and a former crack dealer, that look as absurd as this:

Anti-Mormon:

Former Crack dealer:
I really connected with the characters. Isn’t that what a movie is about? Connecting with them, feeling what they feel? Most movies are an escape for the viewer. Some movies you just watch from the safety of a chair and a bag of popcorn. This movie was an escape from who you are; you experienced the love Woody had for his owner Andy, the love he has for the other toys, and now I know the love from one toy to another is no small thing.

I saw it in 3d and it was seamless and perfect. The visual effects were flawless. They demonstrated how far the technology has come. Didn’t irritate the eyes at all.

4 huge stars!

Did I mention it was great and fantastic?

Knight and Day

Knight and Day
Rated: PG-13
Grade: C

Tom Cruise – I do, and always will, think that Tom Cruise is nuts… and 5’2. I know he’s 5’7ish but for some reason I just picture him as a lot smaller. As for the nuts thing, I don’t know the guy, but I did see clips of that Oprah with him and the couch. I dislike the guy. I wouldn’t want to talk to him in real life.

So when I say that Tom Cruise makes the movie, you have to understand. It's a disappointment. Roy Miller as a character is fun to watch, engaging to see, and a thrill to experience. Tom Cruise played it with the same fun he brought to Tropic Thunder and the dancing movie producer. That fun, that energy could make someone famous and has brought him back from the PR disaster that is Scientology. (Please don’t sue me)

Cameron Diaz was dull and boring except for one scene when she is walking from the airplane bathroom, having bolstered her ego, ignoring the dead bodies around her to plant a kiss on the stranger that is Tom Cruise. That scene was an A. The rest of her performance whether it was the writers or her failed miserably. As an audience member you cant connect with her at all. You cant relate with her decisions. She changes constantly from being in panic to being OK, with for no rhyme or reason (except to transition the movie). You just kind of give her that look you give when you feel sorry for someone. It’s a long movie to be giving that look.

So those are the only two characters in the movie that matter.

Villain in the movie was dumb. Roy Miller is a CIA super agent. His partner, his equal, is Fitzerald. Thing is… he isn’t equal at all. He pouts hard and runs around aimlessly. He isn’t shooting people and when he finally does have a gun his hand shakes cause he is so nervous. This is the villain? Its not that Peter Sarsgaard did a bad job, its that the writers made him a pansy. If he is supposed to be the equal, make him the equal. Show him hopping on cars, walking oblivious to bullets buzzing, and have the "turn your head in slow-mo while something blows up in the background"… or if you don’t want to show it, at least imply he’s capable of it.

Oh and Paul Dano did a decent job as a nerd… but what’s up with the facial hair? It was creepy. Actually previous decent job comment redacted. He was creepy.

One thing I can't decide if I like or didn't like was the transitions. They literally drug June or Roy and then close their eyes (the screen itself changes to be from their perspective), new three second scene... rinse and repeat till you are where you want to end up. Its a weird transition and just kind of felt lazy.

Graphics were pretty crappy too. There is a scene where they are running with the bulls. Well they are riding a motorcycle with the bulls, and it looks horrible.

The gimmick of the movie is you don’t know who the bad guy is, who is the good guy, who is betraying America, what’s wrong with the battery, but really… you know the whole time. Cause its Freaking Tom Cruise, so you know he wouldn’t sign up on a movie where he turns out to be the bad guy. He’s dancing in a fat suit cool, not Christian Bail wants to kill everyone in Terminator Salvation cool.

So the movie was rewritten a hundred times and in pre-production for 5 years, and it shows.

The movie is action filled and boring.

The movie has great one-liners and even gets a laugh, but isn’t funny.

It could have been dramatic but I didn’t care about anyone.

So as sad as it makes me to say, because of Tom Cruise the movie gets 2 stars out of 4 as oppose to a turkey.