Movie reviews
 

Just like the video game forum, here is a forum for movie reviews. I don't know if this one was already started, but here's another one. First of all, I gotta say that my favorite movie is Shaun of the dead or t2. The three worst movies i have ever seen were Kung Pow, House of the Dead, and Darkness.

Lemony Snickets A Series of Unfortunate Events SUCKED!

I took my 4 & 5 yo to see it and it was unbelievably gawd-awful.

Miracle: The 1980 Olympic Hockey movie. I finally saw it last night. Maybe I was their target audience, since I watched the televised games as a 15yo into pond hockey, but it really felt like the times. I don't know how a younger person would react to it. The thing did touch me. One interesting thing was that you could see the beginnings of the tragedy-a-thon that recent Olympic coverage has become in Jim Craig's story. Its almost like they've forgotten how to tell stories on tv with their over-production. It was interesting that they told the story from Herbs perspective and then addressed the question of it being about Herb or the team with the news conference scenes. It was about the team. I think.

Lake Placid must have been a tough place to run those games, the traffic there can be a PIA. If you could close off the main drag to autos somehow it would be great location.

My favorite movies: LOTR trilogy, Contact, Signs.
Worst that I won't sit through, even on cable: Kung Pow, Bubba Ho-Tep, Flight of Dragons, Hobbit/LOTR cartoon movies, any movie with Tim Allen.

Recently, I watched and actually enjoyed <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369339/?fr=c2l0ZT1kZnxteD0yMHxzZz0xfGxtPTIwMHx0dD1vbnxwbj0wfHE9Y29sbGF0ZXJhbHxodG1sPTF8bm09b24_;fc=1;ft=9;fm=1">Collateral</a>. Tom Cruise really didn't suck in this film and the camera work was really well done. The plot kind of thinned out towards the end, however...

From what I remember it wasn't too bad, the event locations are really spread out with only a few, including the hockey arena, being right in Lake Placid. We didn't see 'the miracle" but did go to a bunch of other events. Later, the local ski team that I was on often competed at Mt Vanhoevenberg and Whiteface Mt.

Napoleon Dynamite is HILARIOUS! Just let your mind go and don't think to hard when you watch it. You'll get a good laugh.

Even Toy Stories 1 and 2? Those are about the only movies my kid likes that I can sit through nowadays. Them and Iron Giant.

Tim Allen was also good in Galaxy Quest, though I do tend to avoid him otherwise.

The part I liked best was when the kids asked you "Daddy, were you alive then?"

noooo.... I thought it rocked. Maybe not so much for the four/five-year-old range, but for my nine & eleven-year-olds ... We enjoyed it. . .

The leeches scared the bejeezus out of my boyee, though. He jumped up, "Mom, I <i>gotta</i> go to the bathroom. . . now!" Too funny for words.

I also liked the costuming, but that's probably because I'm enthralled by goth-esque and victorian kind of styles. The little buckles up baby Sunny's sleeves? Perfect.

Two greats off the top of my head:

Blade Runner - Excellent sci-fi movie. The dark atmosphere of the whole thing was impressive. However, I prefer the theatrical version with the overdubs and not the theatrical version. Fortunately, I've got the VHS 'cause the only thing available on dvd is the director's cut.

Favorite quote - "Sushi - that's what my ex-wife used to call me - cold fish."


The Thin Man - Excellent mystery/comedy. Lots of witty dialog. Powell and Loy were especially good together.

Favorite quote -

Nick Charles: I'm a hero. I was shot 2 times in the Tribune.
Nora Charles: I read where you were shot 5 times in the tabloids.
Nick Charles: It's not true. He didn't come anywhere near my tabloids.

I thought is started and ended a bit tediously, but found the middle bits quite enjoyable.

Same with Life Aquatic - Wes Anderson's worst movie, but still one of the better films last year.

Phantom of the Opera was disappointing - Christine was the only cast member who could sing particularly well. Though I should say I'm not a huge fan of the musical soundtrack even with great singers.

Meet the Fockers was passable but not up to the level of its predecessor. It relied a bit too heavily on surname wordplay. The baby was cute.

My girls are pre-teen, so I see a lot of that kind of movie.

Last night it was Princess Diaries 2. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. The plot was predictable. But Hathaway and Andrews were both charming and there was enough humor to make it watchable.

My family saw Lemony Snicket. It wasn't great art, but it was harmless entertainment for the whole family, and I always enjoy watching Jim Carrey do his thing.

OC - Back when I used to do the movie review thing for the UMKC school paper, one of the films I got passes to was Contact. I was enraptured, having long been a Sagan fan. At the end, as the lights came up, this teenager behind me stood up and said, "That movie sucked! Nothing happened!"

It was then that I knew there was no future for our race.

LSASOUE
 

I saw Lemony snicket and i didn't think it was Carey's best movie because he wasn't too funny and he slapped the kid, but the sets were great, but definitely a minor disappointment.

and he slapped the kid,

It was in the book... what was Carrey supposed to do, take a moral stand and not do the movie? :confused:

What's moral about pretending that evil villains who want to kill or forcibly marry children would never stoop so low as to slap them?

All Crossfire said was that since Carrey slapped the kid, he didn't enjoy the performance as much as he enjoyed other parts/movies Carrey has played in. I don't think he meant that Carrey shouldn't have done it.

I was mortified by the storyline and would not have taken my little ones had I done my homework. I would have liked it a lot more if I had seen it with my wife instead. I should have pointed that out in my first comment. My dislike for the movie was based on my expectation that it was a movie for (little) kids.

That's what i meant to do, Beestie is absolutely right. Carrey definitely was great in it, and i did not read the book, so if it was in the book, than fine, i just didn't think he was funny and i didn't like that the kid was slapped in a children's film
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Napoleon Dynamite ok, i had seen bits and pieces of this but never paid attention. it just looked like it would be stupid humor and i like stupid humor so i put in on my netflix list. it came on saturday. i watched it with my wife last night and all i have to say is that i feel really really ripped off. used. dirty even. that was one of the worst ideas to ever be put on film. maybe i just don't get it. maybe you have to be drunk or high to really like it. maybe i should have been content to just laugh at the 3 minutes of it i had seen before, because 90+ minutes was torture. 90+ minutes wasted, and yet it was like a trainwreck, i couldn't look away.

Well, Toy Story didn't really have tim allen in it, per se.

And Galaxyquest rocked, actually. But The only other things I've seen him in are Christmas Movies That Suck.

Dodgeball - A formulaic comedy that is ironically aware of how formula it is. This means it can sell to mainstream audiences and still play to more savvy ones, but has a tough line to walk. Sometimes it does so by playing up a few lowball gags ala the new gross-out comedy. Still, it manages most of the time, and does have a large number of funny bits that work well to bring it along, as well as the brilliant Stephen Root and Rip Torn. Hasselhoff and Shatner put in nice self-parodying cameos. For a lowball fake sport comedy I prefer Baseketball by a small margin.

I watched Baseketball by accident one night. It is hysterical, although Mrs. Elspode watched it with me at a later date and summarized her opinion thus:

"This is one of those movies that is funny if you're a guy, right?"

Well, yeah...but now she can't say I didn't *try* to help her understand guys.

I personally thought Baseketball was horrible and I'm a guy. I also hate gross-out movies. Napoleon Dynamite was better than expected, but perhaps you need to understand really dry comedy. I just came back from White Noise and never trust the critics. They all hammered, but I thought it was very good.

Ah, White Noise.
Mrs. Roo has been asking if we can see this when it opens here. I must admit it does look quite good from the trailers. Nice to hear someone say something nice about it as I didn't want to get bitten again like I did with Cabin Fever.

What's the deal with Darkness? IMDB shows it as having a 2002 release date, but it's in theaters now.

For all your sakes, please avoid Darkness like the plague, I have never seen a worse, more confusing movie, and I love bad movies.

Did anyone see the village?

I haven't seen it yet, but I LOVE Night's movies. Without divulging plot details, can you tell me if it's up to normal Night fare?

Was anyone else terribly dissapointed in the extra material in the extended Return of The King?

They added 50 minutes and 49 of it was crap.

no way! they added the whole saruman death scene in the extended cut. I thought it was fine.

Jinx and I just watched I Robot. I dug it. Robots are cool. u huh huh.

We watched Wicker Park last night. I highly recommend it.

But it was a piddly death scene and it left out the scouring of the shire.

The scouring of the Shire wasn't filmed at all, according to everything I've heard.

I also liked "I Robot", and I thought they did a pretty good job of not totally screwing up Asimov's original concepts in rendering the Robot short stories into an original film. Asimov is pretty much my favorite author of all time, so if I'm not peeved, no one should be.

You have to wonder about the truth of it when you recall Frodo's look into Galadriel's tub shows the scouring going on.

Good point...

That was all that was filmed. They didn't film any of the "Scouring" storyline. From day one, long before most of ROTK was filmed, they said that the Galadriel's mirror scene was Peter Jackson's homage to the "scouring" chapter, since he marked that chapter for deletion early on.

He did the same thing with Tom Bombadil, grabbing a few scenes and lines from the Bombadil chapter and putting it in the Ent section.

The added material still sucked.

And he only made the Gimli as comic relief crap worse.

That's my main beef with the movies. Not only did he make Gimli a joke, but it's based on present day references (ie dwarf tossing). :mad2:

New scenes I liked:
Eowyn's Dream
Faramir/Denethor/Boromir
Eomer finds Eowyn

I'm not sure about the "Mouth of Sauron" scene. I'm glad it was there, but the Mouth was supposed to be human.

Piddly or not, it answered a question I've personally had since the theater release: Whatever happened to him? In Two Towers, we saw Saruman's base get leveled, minus the tower, and saw everything he put all his time into destroyed...but we never saw what happened to him. In Return, we saw Meri and Pippin and the Treebeard, but still not sign of Saruman. Those few minutes were nothing cinematically spectacular or clever or anything. It just answered a question and I figured Saruman was an important enough character to get some kind of resolution after all he had gone through. I'd have liked it to have been in the theater release myself.

I thought it was a decent scene, given the constraint of the altered setting. It preserved the mechanism of his death, and added a parallel to Gandalf's fall. I would have liked the heroes to show a bit more doubt in response to Saruman's oratorical skills, though.

I'd forgotten about that scene, yeah, too weird.

In the last month or so I've seen:

Closer - If you want to see 4 beautiful-ish people talking, only talking (but a lot and in graphic detail) about sex, then you'll dig it - Despite Julia Roberts' bulging vein.

Kinsey - More sex, but this time shown - with Liam Neeson (ick). Other than that, it's pretty good and sorta interesting. Laura Linney is great. If you like her, you should see P.S. with her and Topher Grace.

A Very Long Engagement - It was a VERY long engagement. Pretty to look at (as with all Jean-Pierre Jeunet's films), but this one lacked something. Too complicated? Maybe. Or just too drawn out. See Amelie if you haven't. It's wonderfully cute and fun.

The Life Aquatic - I liked it. I chuckled a few times. Bill Murray is always great. But, it's my least favorite out of Anderson's movies. See Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums instead.

Ocean's Twelve - It's... just ok. Nothing like Ocean's Eleven, which I loved. I guess I expected another fun heist movie. I didn't get it.

Ray - Probably one of my favorite movies of the year. The music is awesome. Jamie Foxx needs an Oscar for this.

Ok, I'll stop.

:corn: I have no life, so I watch movies.

Many people were disappointed by it, but I enjoyed it.

It's not as good as The Sixth Sense, but I thought it was better than Unbreakable.

The movie got a couple extra points from me, though because

1. A coworker's daughter is in the film. She plays the older of William Hurt's younger children

2. The property on which the movie was filmed is owned by a friend's sister. Because of work I missed out on an opportunity to tour the set. :(

To be honest, I was very disappointed my the movie. It was set up like a suspense thriller and then turned out to be more of a drama. Still, watch it to see what you think.

Troy sucked

I saw "National Treasure" with Marci and Jeffrey. Not as good as "Raiders of the Lost Ark", but still a roller-coaster of a movie. It was a little over 2 hours and kept up a fast pace the entire time.

Nicholas Cage plays one of his stock characters, the slightly odd but entirely capable and polite hero who doesn't look like he can do it but ends up getting the girl.

Good action and good dialogue. Disney throws in historical tidbits. The only possible inaccuracy is that "Freemasons are descended from the Knights Templar". This is one of a number of theories, but is by no means conclusive. Still, it is accepted by a large number of people.

Like Raiders, this movie does make history "cool". There were some scenes shot in Independence Hall and at the Franklin Institute. They did play some games with local geography, moving the plaza near Independence Hall closer to it so that a clue could be found.

Has anyone seen Sideways? I want to see it and have heard good things about it. I also heard it is a strong R for sex scenes, so we'll leave Jeff at home.

"Sideways" is an excellent quirky character drama and a road movie set in Napa Valley. It speaks beautifully to quirky white middle-aged men trying to make sense of their lives, which is why I thought it was just brilliant.

The issue I have with non-blockbuster movies is that unless a movie needs a big screen and big sound system, it makes more economic sense to buy it as a used DVD and keep it.

Without coupons, the Regal theatre here is $9 per person. A used DVD from Blockbuster is $8-10. So unless I am desperate to see a movie or discuss it with friends when it comes out, it makes sense to wait 6 months and buy a used copy.

BTW, lets not forget the difference in price between two microwaved bags of popcorn and a soda from the fridge at home versus $20 for a large popcorn and two drinks at the theatre.

I am this close to just buying a 50 inch set and watching all movies at home.

I saw Troy, it was ok, just i wish there had been more action, I have absolutely seen better war movies. I really liked National Treasure, but to be honest, I'm scared/curious as to what the future holds for the extremity of Disney movies.

I just came back from Phantom of the Opera. The critics panned it, but you're a fool to believe them. Instead believe the fact that it was nominated for 3 golden globe awards. This movie was not a film, but rather an experience. Are you a Phantom fan? GO SEE THIS!!!!!!!!!! Never heard of Phantom: GO SEE THIS!!!!!!!!!

I don't know if anyone has seen it, or mentioned it here, but Harold and Kumar Go To Whitekastle is damn funny.

Mmmm, White Castle. Haven't had good White Castle since I left Scranton. But, there is a Southern equivalent: Krystal. Mmmmmm.

White Castle is another teen movie... Not really what I like.
Troy is still better than Alexander. I really didn't like that movie

We saw Million Dollar Baby yesterday. I was expecting it to be a total downer because it's another Clint Eastwood movie. His last film was Mystic River. Man, I was ready to slit my wrists after that one. But Million Dollar Baby was actually pretty good. Sad, yes... But a great story (and a few good laughs thrown in too). Hillary Swank kicks some major ass in this movie :boxers: There were a few scenes that made people clap and a few scenes where sniffles could be heard throughout the theatre. I'll tell ya, it's not easy watching Dirty Harry cry.