Gary's Movie Reviews: I Can't Like 'Em All! Trying to Forget "Sarah Marshall", Stopping "Unstoppable", Clashing with "the Titans", and the Day Keanu Reeves' Career Stood Still

I am a movie lover, but that doesn't mean I love all movies.  It's doesn't even mean I will love all movies the critics or audiences love.  Here are four such examples (the titles link to the trailers, and there's a few other surprises):

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Why do all these current romantic comedies have to be so raunchy?  Modern audiences seem to love raunch, and can't seem to get through a movie without it.  Admittedly, Jason Segel has an appealing, laid back presence.  He also wrote this movie.  I didn’t think I was going to like it at all, but the story and the comedy picked up a bit in the second half, thanks mostly to Segel, both as a writer and an actor.  His character’s Dracula musical with puppets (linked here, here, and here for different versions, including the  night club intro, the movie "table read", and the actual puppet musical) was hilarious, one of the highpoints of this movie.  For the rest of it, he has some chemistry with new girlfriend Mila Kunis, but Kristen Bell is in the thankless role of the self-absorbed TV star Sarah Marshall, and Jonah Hill and Russell Brand try to outdo each other with their improv comedy bits – Brand wins, if that’s really any consolation prize.  I just don’t understand why they have to interject so much base humor.  The film would be much better without it, and would appeal to a wider audience.  As it is, it’s just another raunchy comedy for a mostly young, immoral audience.  And consider that the version I saw was probably the cleaned up version on basic cable, making me wonder what filth they did cut!

Unstoppable

I’d have to chalk this one up to a nice try.  Ethan Suplee (that’s right, Earl’s brother from My Name is Earl) plays an idiot (again) who leaves the cab of his train to throw a switch, while the train is in gear, and then can’t get back on.  The train picks up speed and threatens all the towns in the surrounding area, and it’s up to Chris Pine and Denzel Washington, as a newly hired conductor and an about-to-retire engineer to try to stop it, after a few other attempts to stop it ended in disaster.  If they don't succeed, it will soon go around a curve in a highly populated area at such a high rate of speed, it will derail.  Oh man, wouldn't you just know it, this is right in the midst of a chemical dump with huge drums full of explosive liquids!  
     Try as they might to work up some thrills and adrenaline, and to make you care about these two characters, it just doesn’t work, and brings to mind similar movies like Speed and the exciting train scene from Back to the Future, Part III (linked here!).  The roller coaster derailment at the beginning of Final Destination 3 (linked here!) was scarier and more thrilling, and that was just for the opening credits of an inferior horror movie sequel!  I mean, it was okay, but not at the top of my list.

     Or let me put it this way:  They took an exciting train scene from a James Bond movie, expanded it to a full length film, removed all the gadgets, girls, super spies and villains, and replaced them not with cops or firefighters or the military, but with a couple of clichéd working shlubs who try to stop a runaway train that is not the result of a terrorist or some demented criminal mastermind, but instead is the result of an idiot leaving his cab to throw a switch in a train yard.  Excited yet?

Clash of the Titans

This was the story of Perseus, half-god/half-man son of the Greek god Zeus, and since it was made in 2010, almost 30 years after the one with Harry Hamlin, the movie, of course, wasn’t as cheesy, and the effects were much better, as you’d expect them to be.  Ralph Feinnes plays Hades, King of the Underworld, and Liam Neeson plays Zeus, and the appealing Sam Worthington is Perseus, and the film is peppered with the likes of Andromeda, Apollo, Athena, and creatures such as the Ginn, giant scorpions, Pegasus, Medusa, and the Cracken.  With all this, I was expecting to be caught up in it more than I was.  I found the whole affair strangely unmoving and rather perfunctory.  They did their homework, crossed all their T’s and dotted all their I’s, but there’s not much here beyond what you’d expect.  With everything I listed above, it should have been more entertaining.  In some ways, there were a few things I actually like better about the old film with the Ray Harryhousen stop motion creatures (linked here), and the gods on Mt. Olympus were actually rendered better, and much more colorfully, in Disney's Hercules (linked here)  At least in that one they had personality and had fun with it!  In this movie, they seem rather boring, and don't do an awful lot other than standing around in dull surroundings, dressed in drab garb, and glowing.  If you ever wanted to know how something could be both dazzling and drab at the same time, this is it!  

The Day the Earth Stood Still

I never saw the original, but I’d have to imagine that this one must have been quite similar (see the 1951 trailer here).  It felt old fashioned.  I don’t know if the ecology angle permeated the first one, but here, it wound up feeling pretty preachy and hokey.  I thought the whole point of the movie would be our tendency to be aggressive, and that the aliens retaliated only when someone with an itchy trigger finger shot one of the aliens.  Although this happened, that wasn’t the point of the movie.  The point of the movie was Keanu Reeves as the emotionless alien (a role just about perfect for Reeves) collecting animal specimens before killing all the humans because humans are destroying the earth.  It’s the old “turtles are more valuable than people” adage you get from all those animal loving societies like Greenpeace and PETA.  The message was blunt and heavy handed, and even though he is able to see the goodness in people eventually, you would have thought a species advanced enough to be able to fly through space and have the technology to actually kill all the humans and save everything else would have already known about the compassionate side of people.  So the earth is saved, and who do we have to thank?  The scientist played by Jennifer Connelly, her bratty little adopted son, and a genius recluse played by John Cleese.  Oh, and the representative to the President played by Kathy Bates, along with all the “suits”, the military, and the distant President, almost gets all of humanity annihilated.  Maybe they should have played that up a little bit more, but all we got was a sad look towards the end from Kathy Bates.  Keanu Reeves as the main alien is wooden, even in the end, when he's supposed to be feeling something!  Oh well.  Next…