This was a cute
movie, and of course, not believable for a second. But as a cute family movie, just go with
it! The CGI penguins are rendered
believable and cute, if just a bit too human, but the movie thankfully didn’t
devolve into Zookeeper territory, even
when the main penguin, named Captain, who tried to imitate flying birds, got
stuck to a kite in the end and flew to safety, soaring over the mean old
penguin expert who was going to separate them and sell them to different zoos.
This was a fun
zombie apocalypse movie on a global scale.
The major drawback is the frenetic, in-your-face, you-are-there camera
work with the fast, shaky, tilted images darting all over the place. I understand the concept of the handheld
style being used to help denote realism, but could you crank it back
please. I hate it when you can barely
tell what’s going on!
This was the
story of four Star Wars geeks on a cross country trip to break into George
Lucas Skywalker Ranch and steal the first print of Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace before it’s officially
released to the public. They have a
noble reason for doing such a thing, since they love Star Wars so much, and one of them, played by the appealing
Chris Marquette (Joan of Arcadia), is dying of cancer and won’t see it before he dies. Along the way, they run across William
Shatner, who gives them plans and security codes for Lucas’ estate, and a nurse
who looks like Princess Leia, played by, you guessed it, Carrie Fisher, and they have an ongoing battle with a bunch of boorish Trekkies, and if truth be told,
I like Jay Baruchel (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) and Sam Huntington (Being Human) playing two of the other geeks, yet
given this premise and cast, it should have been funny and emotional, and it
was really neither. Big Bang Theory it is not, unfortunately. Additionally, I
didn’t like Dan Fogler (Balls of Fury) as the overweight, sex-crazed, filthy geek, and similar
to fans of Michelle Pfeiffer wondering what she was doing in Grease 2, we have Kristen Bell as a girl
geek traveling with the guys and secretly in love with Baruchel’s
character. It’s just one of those things
that makes you go “Huh?”
This was pretty
good, and some of the characters, including the main one, were rather
charming. Cute and quirky are the words of choice
here. It’s
about a young man, played by Jay Baruchel, whose parents were killed in a car
accident along with the mother of his fiancé.
He’s taken over his father’s job as the small town’s major radio
DJ/host, and eventually begins to realize that, although he’s good at it and is
well liked by the town, this might not be his choice of careers. When a local girl comes back to town after
leaving college, he hits it off with her, inspiring her to follow her dream of
music, and realizes he may only be with his fiancé out of their shared
grief. All of this is presented in a
reveal about midway through, as these people play themselves or other people as
part of a “film within a film,” and this might be an interesting twist if it
added anything to the story, but it doesn’t.
It’s a twist that just sort of sits there and doesn’t go anywhere, much
like this movie.
One interesting side note is that
the screenplay was written by someone named Reed Fish, so I’m guessing it’s all
sort of some experimental postmodern meta-fiction, especially with the concept
of the film within a film that is already in the movie, and with Jay Baruchel
playing a character with the same name as the screenwriter, I’m wondering if
this meta-fiction doesn’t possibly proceed to the level of the real – sort of a
movie within a movie about a real guy.
However, whether it does or not, even this concept doesn’t really add
anything or make the romance and character at the center of the story any
better.
There are so
many haunted house movies out right now, it’s hard to know what to even
pick! There’s Mama, The Conjuring, The Last Exorcism Part II, The Lords of Salem,
Sinister, The Possession, The Woman in Black, V/H/S and S VHS, The Devil
Inside, the Paranormal Activity movies, The House at the End of the Street, Silent
House, The Awakening, Insidious and
Insidious 2, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, and The Rite, to name just a few over the last few years. Dark
Skies looked like more of the same, with Kerri Russell and Josh Hamilton as
the put upon adults suffering a haunting with their two boys. Turns out, however, it’s not a haunting. Instead, it’s aliens, and these things are
even creepier than the ones you might have seen in Signs or Close Encounters of
the Third Kind. These are “the
greys”, which any knowledgeable alien conspiracy theorist (of which I am not)
is already well acquainted with. (A co-worker of mine believes in all of this, along with quite a few other hard-to-swallow conspiracy theories, and has, at the very least, opened my eyes to the quite vast number of people in the subculture that delves into such ideas.) Is
there really such a thing as "greys", as these characters find out (from J.K. Simmons)? Well, there’s a reason why this is filed
under “F” for fiction. I’ll believe it
when I see it firsthand (which is really the only way to believe it). As for the movie, it has some chilling
parts. Not to give anything away, but
the ending was a downer. We didn’t like
the way it ended, and I’ve heard from others who felt the same. This is okay for a few good chills, but it’s
slight otherwise.
I caught the
beginning of this, and never had the desire to see the end of it. It was all right, but not as good as many
other animated movies I’ve seen. If the
truth be told, I actually prefer the older live action short from 1984. Nice voice work by Atticus Shaffer (Brick
from The Middle) as the weird
hunchback kid Edgar ‘E’ Gore, though (see the entire original, and another early Tim Burton short called "Vincent", linked here).
First reaction
is one of disappointment. This is, first
and foremost, a heavily produced and edited church sermon, and not one that
particularly moved me. Kirk Cameron is
very impassioned with this message, but in the end, I’m not sure he was able to
answer his own question specifically, which was, “Why does God allow bad things
to happen to good people?” He glosses
over the idea of the Anthropic principle that Dinesh D’Souza covers so well in
his otherwise awkwardly titled book Godforsaken: Bad Things Happen. Is There a God Who Cares? Yes.
Here’s Proof. He also doesn’t
even stop to ponder the question of whether or not there truly are “good
people” in a world of imperfect sinners.
As devout Christians, the son of close friends died of cancer when both
families and their church were praying for healing, and Kirk started wrestling
with the questions of evil and suffering in the world, and began to take
another look at the opening stories of the bible: Adam and Eve, Cain and Able,
Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel, the Hebrew Nation and Abraham, all
leading to the birth of Christ, and His death and resurrection on the cross,
stories and themes that are very familiar to Christians. But did he answer the question of suffering
to our satisfaction? Even he admits
there will always be a question mark (though, he says, for him and his faith,
that question mark has been turned into an exclamation point).
The filming of the story of Adam and
Eve, and Cain and Abel, were a little strange and over the top, if you ask me,
and the scene where he tries to pitch the story of Noah to Hollywood producers
was played for laughs and to be an eye-opening revelation at the same time, but
it simply falls flat. We – that is
myself, my Mom, and my sister and her rather reluctant family were all disappointed. The film itself was only an hour, but felt
like at least two. It was instead the
live half hour introduction from Liberty University that happened to be more
moving, when Kirk interviewed a Vietnam veteran who gave his life to God after
his legs were blown off, and Charles Woods, father of slain Navy Seal Tyrone
Woods who was killed in Benghazi.
Mandisa and Warren Barfield were also on hand to sing catchy tunes with
powerful messages. Kirk’s “personal journal”
of a movie was simply not as good.
I like how they all say God and His
message are unstoppable, even when Facebook and YouTube apparently tried to
shut down his attempts to market it to his main Christian audience, but just
because someone makes a documentary, or a song, or a poem, or anything else about
God, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good just because the focus in on God. I actually liked some of Kirk’s previous
Christian movies, maligned though they were among the non-Christian community,
such as Fireproof and Monumental. In this case, however, this one needed more work.
With all of this said, I will also
say it’s really nice to see the former teen heartthrob of the old show Growing Pains be so on fire for
Jesus. I wish there were more
celebrities like him!
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