But that's not to say that I love all movies, or that I'm never disappointed. I may not have hated these twelve movies I saw last year, but I was disappointed, at least a little bit. I imagine some of the movies on this list other people probably loved (I can hear it all now: "Why did you put a James Bond picture on this list?" "What's wrong with Big Miracle?" "Hey, Zookeeper was a cute family film!" "Why did you include a film about the life of Jesus?") And the thing is, there are things I liked about each one of these: A performance here (The Iron Lady), some action there (Quantum of Solace), or some okay FX (The Blob), some good characters (Super 8) or comedy (Airheads) or a good message (King of Kings). But in the end, these were just simply a bit of a let down. Read on to find I why I thought so (and the titles all link to trailers or videos!):
The Blob
Okay,
for the record, let me just say that I like James Bond. I really do.
I even liked some of the lesser Bond films starring some of the lesser
Bonds, like Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton.
They are enjoyable. However, after all those novels and films, 25 in all
(I’m including David Niven’s appearance in the parody Casino Royale from 1967, Daniel Craig’s brand new 3rd
Bond film Skyfall, and Sean Connery
in Never Say Never Again, which is
not considered “cannon” and is a loose remake of Thunderball), they all start to meld together and are somewhat
interchangeable. At this point, with
such a franchise, it’s hard for a single movie to stand on its own. It’s not a stretch of
the imagination to say that if you’ve seen 20 Bond films, you’re really not going
to see anything new in the latest chapter.
There’s Bond, the cool Bond vehicles and contraptions, the gorgeous Bond
women, the evil Bond villains, the exotic locations and international
espionage, all brought to you by the letters M & Q and the number 007. That basically describes
every Bond movie ever made. The plot is
coincidental.
I’d heard of
this movie before, about Brendan Fraser, Steve Buscemi, and Adam Sandler as
three metal heads who take a radio station hostage to have their demo tape
played. It had a certain dumb allure
about it, especially at a time when all three of these actors were on the way
up, but was ultimately forgettable, and the music, not my taste, of course,
sucked.
This movie
should have been better than it was, and maybe it’s because when we watched it, the picture was set
too dark. I couldn’t see anything. The movie had a certain nostalgic appeal that
brought to mind other films such as Explorers, The Monster Squad, Matinee, and The Goonies. Some kids
growing up in the 70’s are making a very cheap 8mm zombie film and in the middle of filming, they capture the destruction of a derailed
train. When the military starts to take
over the town, the kids discover it has something to do with a very dangerous alien creature. For me,
I actually preferred all these other films that mixed artistic, youthful
nostalgia with a bit of sci-fi creepiness.
When they showed the monster in all its gory glory, which was still very
hard to see, the main kid has some sort of tlelepathic connection with it, and it lets them
go, but this is after it has killed a whole bunch of people, some of
them perfectly innocent victims, and I just couldn’t feel sympathy for it. And I hated that ending! [SPOILER ALERT] The creature makes a new spaceship to leave
earth, but to complete it, it needs the locket with the picture of the
protagonist’s dead mother. Say what? What was sweet to
some was, to me, overly cheesy and bizarre.
This Hallmark Channel production also wasn’t too bad, yet in point of fact, I have seen both Neve Campbell and Patrick
Stewart do better work; Neve in the superior Scream franchise and Stewart as Captain Picard and, later,
Professor Xavier. Still, this was a fun,
little movie, but given the source material, from Oscar Wilde, it should have
been more. As it was, it reminded me of
inferior ghost stories such as High
Spirits (1988) starring Steve Guttenberg and Daryl Hannah, and The Haunted Mansion (2003) starring
Eddie Murphy. I’m afraid any ghost story
that happens to be easily compared to films like that doesn’t have a high
credibility factor. In the end, this is
just another forgettable little family film for a weekend afternoon on basic
cable rather than a must-see, great rendition of a literary masterpiece.
Based on the previews, I was
expecting something a bit different. Bradley Cooper, looking the worse for wear (if you can imagine that!) plays a junkie who takes a pill that will give
him full use of his entire brain, changing him into a genius
extraordinaire! The trouble is, the
effects don’t last, and he has to keep taking it, or it will kill him! The story severely derails when you start to
realize the focus of this movie is on the junkie aspect of the characters and not really on the possibilities
of what a person could do with full access to all of their brain, as the previews teased. In other words, the plot forsakes the more fantastical elements to instead focus
on the story of a bunch of junkies hooked on a drug. It revels in the base elements that accompany
drug abusers, such as the scene towards the end [SPOILER ALERT] when the main character infects
his girlfriend to help him, and, when he’s dry and in need of instant IQ
points, he sucks blood off the floor belonging to a murder victim who was
himself taking the drug. See what I mean?
I like Emma Stone. I really
do. And going in, I was kind of
intrigued by the concept of a high school student using some themes from
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlett
Letter, yet actually wearing that red “A” with pride, even though she had
not actually been adulterous. As with
such characters as Ferris Bueller
(1986), Charlie Bartlett (2007), and Juno (2007), she tries to rise above the
normal riff-raff of her fellow students and clueless teachers, but it all comes
crashing down before the end, and she really winds up no smarter than anyone
else in this movie. She tries to wield
her magic “A” like a superpower, to help her geeky classmates out of the social
pariah pool or to aid her gay friends into remaining in the closet, safe from
the heckles and suspicions of their classmates.
It even works for a while, but in the meantime, she skates on the edge
of morality, even if she isn’t doing the deed.
In the end, I’d say it’s probably as bad to pretend to do it for money,
and it puts her only one step above a hooker. I think the makers of this film would like to
think their as socially conscious as those who make Heathers
(1988) or Mean Girls (2004), but it
falls way short.
I
like Kevin James, and there were a few funny sequences, and to be fair, some of
my favorite films over the years have had talking animals, such as Babe, Stuart Little, Charlotte’s
Web, and
Alice in Wonderland. But having talking animals doesn't guarantee that it's going to be irresistibly cute. Case in point: Sylvester Stallone and Cher as the voice of the lions. They add absolutely nothing to the picture, other than to add two more famous people as voices. We were just starting to enjoy the movie when Kevin James manages to get away from
the zoo and starts to have a good time with costar Rosario Dawson. Then he made the mistake of, as my brother joked, "calling the gorilla for dating advice!” For every halfway successful talking
animal flick like Beverly Hills Chihuahua
(2008) or Good Boy (2003), there are
tons of other films like the Cats &
Dogs and the Air/Snow Buddies
franchises. A film like Zookeeper comes dangerously close to
that kid pandering type of film. Try getting through the entire scene I included linked to the title.
I was disappointed in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and hoped
this old retelling of the Jesus story would be better. It seems, however, that whenever Hollywood
tackled the story of Jesus, they tried to give Jesus and the material the somber reverence it deserves, and
it just doesn’t work. The trailer, linked to the title, shows everything that is ultimately wrong with Hollywood Jesus stories. In their attempt
to make Jesus so worshipful and perfect, it always left Jesus, and the
material, feeling overly detached instead.
Besides being the Son of God, of course, Jesus was a great teacher and
philosopher, but he was also quite human, and was never that
detached. Never do we feel while
watching these old movies that he has real feelings for the humans
he walks with and teaches. Instead, it is some isolated connection to the
Father. I didn’t get that
feeling with Robert Powell’s performance in Jesus
of Nazareth. In that movie, even
though he carried the look of grace and wisdom, when he looked at other people,
or taught them, he really connected with them. You could tell he loved them. These other movie Jesus’ are always looking
upward. They don’t have the loving connection with people they do with the Father,
and that’s just not right. THEY are the
REASON HE CAME! While watching King of Kings with Mom, I finally shut it off after the scene where Jesus
collects Peter and tells him he will make him a “fisher of men.” As shot for this film, it simply felt like
actors on a movie set repeating lines of dialogue. None of it was real. None of it felt real. I then showed her the same scene in Franco
Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazarath, and
there simply was no comparison.
The Zeffirelli film seemed infinitely more “real”! Not only did Jesus seem more real, but so did
Peter and all the others, and even the sets were more real. The
best version of the Jesus story is Jesus
of Nazareth. All the others just don’t
measure up!
I was expecting great
things from The Iron Lady. There was no reason in the world this film
shouldn’t have been as entertaining as The
King’s Speech, especially with Meryl Streep winning yet another Oscar for
her portrayal of Ronald Reagan’s British colleague, Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, who, like Winston Churchill before her, was highly thought of in
conservative republican circles. Yet
despite all of this, this film was NO King’s Speech! Yes, Streep gave a
great performance, but that performance sort of just sat there in a
bubble. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever
seen quite that great of a chameleon-like performance in the middle of such a
mediocre, historical film, especially about somebody I actually liked and
respected! One of the problems was the
way the film was edited together. Ever
since Pulp Fiction dazzled critics by
turning narrative film structure on its head, we’ve gotten countless movies
that tend to jump all over the place.
This was confusing, and there
didn’t seem to be any rhyme of reason for it, and the audience winds up asking
the same thing the actor does when a film is shot out of sequence: “Where is the character at during this point
in their life?” It makes it so hard to
follow! So disappointing!
Okay, for as much as the right, and I
included, might want to complain about movies with a pro-environmentalist
message, such as Avatar or the
otherwise superb animated film The Lorax,
none of them are as blatant as this supposedly warm-hearted family film. Barrymore here plays a character I
found to be thoroughly detestable!
She’s one of those crazy, rabid, domineering, self-righteous, leftist
environmentalists, able to
spout a bunch of facts and figures at the slightest provocation! The whole movie was based on a true story about
a group of three whales (dubbed Fred, Wilma, and Bam Bam) that got stuck behind
in Alaska when the calf was injured (in some sort of net – another crack
against the right), and the adults stayed with it and are now trapped, with the
media jumping on the let’s-all-save-these-three-poor-whales bandwagon, and so
does the head of a big oil company (his wife covertly directing him to that
decision for good PR) and eventually, even the Russians get involved. And in the middle of it all is Drew
Barrymore, getting self-righteous and hot and bothered with her annoying little lisp. I liked the John Krasinski and Kristen Bell characters, and it does have a nice
message about looking out for the planet (that is, when the Barrymore character
isn’t going completely off the deep end).
So it’s not a total loss. I just think it
would have been better without such a heavy-handed, liberal assault!
I couldn’t quite get through all of the first Madagascar movie, and had no desire to
sit through another one. While
leaving the theater, my niece asked me what I thought. I told her it was too over-the-top and
bombastic. She asked me what "bombastic" meant, and I did a lot of annoying mugging for her, shouting “Circus! Afro!
Circus! Afro! Polka-dot! Polka-dot! Polka-dot! Afro!” while dancing around her
with my arms jutting all over the place.
She got the point. If the film
were a bit less, “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” they might just have something there
they could work with, but this was strictly for kids, and for teenagers who
remember them fondly from their childhoods.
Old guys like me don’t apply.
I'm sorry, but all I can think of right now is that Patrick Stewart had hair at one point.
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