Catch up time. Gotta do this a little quickly.
The Artist - I'm sure everyone's heard of this, and everyone's heard how great it is. It won all the Oscars and got tons of hype and pretty much all of it was spot on. This movie was a blast pretty much from start to finish. Jean Dujardin's charisma is incredible and, goddammit, no disrespect to Christopher Plummer, but the dog Uggie should have won Best Supporting Actor. Great cinematography, great directing and a lot of fun. Lived up to the hype.
John Carter - Saw this yesterday with my dad. Went in expecting a relatively good time, left the theater almost in awe of the fact that I had a GREAT time. It's hard for me to pin down what makes this movie so much more fun than many of the other blockbusters of its ilk, and I guess I'm going to have to side with JerseyDevil on this one and say it's got a LOT of heart. Much, much more so than something like Cowboys & Aliens. I'm willing to bet that having Michael Chabon as a screenwriter helped that along, but whoever is responsible should be commended. It's unfortunate that the movie did so poorly at the box office, as I'd now really like to see a sequel get made, but something tells me the chances of that are not very high. Unfortunate. You can also put me squarely in the Lynn Collins for Wonder Woman camp. Sorry, Gina Carano, this lady IS Wonder Woman. I'm actually sort of tempted to re-watch that ****ing Wolverine movie again after finding out she played Silver Fox in it. But, yeah, John Carter was very good and I would buy it, but I'll probably let my dad buy it and then just borrow his copy.
The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence - So, this fat, ugly guy is obsessed with the first movie and decides to one up it by creating a 12 person long human centipede. This one goes straight for the gross-out jugular and doesn't really bother with as much in the way of story as the first one (which might be saying something), and in my opinion suffers for it. There are still some great moments in this one, the part where he tries to get the Centipede to "pass" food is my favorite, but it's not as much fun as the first one and not really a very good movie. Having said that, I still enjoyed it and am happy to have the Blu-ray on my shelf.
The Collector - Sort of like Saw meets Home Alone. A guy plans to rob a house he's been doing some construction work on and find out mid-robbery that someone else has targeted the house, as well, and that someone has set nasty traps all over the house. A pretty straight-forward horror movie with a simple basic plot that is there just enough to move things along to the gore. I guess it's a little silly, but the star of this show is the kills and this one has some good ones. You don't watch it for plot and dialogue, hopefully, you watch it to see people die in nasty ways and there's plenty of that here. I wouldn't buy it, but it was enjoyable for what it was.
Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie - Do you watch Tim & Eric's show on Adult Swim? Then you know what to expect. If you don't, I highly recommend you do before you even consider watching this film. Their sense of humor is very strange and offbeat and it's not for everyone. Personally, I find them sometimes funny. Sometimes really ****ing funny. Sometimes not very funny. I will watch the show when it's on, but I don't always laugh. Sometimes I laugh a lot. My enjoyment of their material is almost as random as their show. So, yeah, 90 minutes of their show all at once was kind of hit and miss, but overall I'd say I enjoyed it. I laughed enough to justify the time spent watching it, but I'm also glad I got to see it for free on HDNet.
Track 29 - All I really knew about this movie going in was that it was directed by Nicolas Roeg and it starred Gary Oldman and Christopher Lloyd. Good enough for me to want to see it. Oldman plays this weird, young Brit guy in the States looking for his biological mother, who he's never met. He comes across Theresa Russell, who is in an unhappy marriage with Christopher Lloyd. Lloyd is a doctor who is much more interested in his model train set than he is in sleeping with his wife and is also having an affair with his nurse, played by Sandra Bernhard. Oldman and Russell start spending some time together and we find out that Russell gave up a child for adoption when she was very young at the behest of her parents...
This was, honeslty, one of the weirdest ****ing movies I've seen in a while. It's very hard to keep a handle on what's going on at certain times and Roeg seems to almost revel in the obscurity. No hints, lots of vague suggestions. It wasn't a bad movie, but I actually found both Russell and Oldman to be really annoying characters and had a hard time watching them. Oldman especially turns into this whiney, bipolar guy who talks like a baby a lot. Just really ****ing bizarre. I would recommend it only as an item of curiosity. After watching it, I read some reviews on IMDB and it seems that nobody there really had much of an idea about what the **** was going on, either. It felt like Roeg was trying to make a point or maybe say something, but whatever that was was lost on me and everyone else.
Bodyguards & Assassins - A political drama disguised as a kung fu movie. All I really knew about this one was that Donnie Yen was the star and that he would be fighting. I had no idea that there would be an actual attempt at a story, or a real character drama or that Yen wouldn't even throw a punch for the first hour. I wasn't quite prepared and it threw me. I was patient and stuck with it, but I kept waiting for the fight scenes to show up. It's basically a movie about an underground resistance group fighting for democracy in China against the Qing dynasty. It's done well enough and has enough good actors to make the dramatic elements work and not be a bad film, but I couldn't help but be disappointed in the lack of fighting. And when the fighting finally does happen, it was somewhat underwhelming. This is a film I might have liked more if I'd watched it under different circumstances, but even then, I don't think I'd like it a whole lot more. It's ok. It's fine. But nothing special.
The Last Wave - Richard Chamberlain is a lawyer in Australia who gets sort of roped into being the defense attorney for a bunch of aborigines accused of killing one of their own. He suspects that the killing may have something to do with a violation of tribal law, but none of the aborigines will say anything about it to him. He also starts having creepy, apocalyptic dreams involving himself and the aborigines and his investigation into both leads him into the dark and murky world (oooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo) of the aborigine tribes. Really liked this one. There's a great amount of atmosphere and tension running through it and it's got some genuinely good creepy bits, too. The ending is fantastic. Recommended.
Burke & Hare - Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are good-for-nothing poor guys who begin killing people and donating their bodies to a local doctor for medical research. It's directed by John Landis, has a ton of people from Spaced in it (Jessica Hines!!!!), and a great supporting cast besides. It was also met with lots and lots of really bad reviews. So I wasn't sure what to expect. For the most part, though, I liked it. It wasn't hilarious, but it was entertaining and had some decent funny bits. I'd give it a thumbs up and I'd say it's worth a watch, but probably not a buy. Damn the critics!
Clash - A Vietnamese action flick about a chick, Trinh, who hires a team of mercenaries to acquire a laptop that she needs to give to a gang boss who has her daughter. Pretty standard action flick, with some good fight scenes and an attractive lead who beats a lot of people up, which pushes a couple of of cinematic fetish buttons. The story and some of the acting is a little subpar, but the fight scenes mostly make up for it. They're not as spectacular as some others, but they're enjoyable and they make this movie worth a watch, but not a buy.
Thunderbolt & Lightfoot - Clint Eastwood is a master criminal bank robber who meets up with Jeff Bridges who is more of a petty thief kind of guy and they get together with Clint's old crew to put on a heist. It's kind of a strange take on the buddy movie with their being a little more to it than just jokes and tapping beerglasses together. It's an entertaining character drama disguised as a buddy movie and it works really, really well. Liked it a lot.
I Melt With You - Four buddies have their annual get together where they binge on alcohol and drugs. As their weekend progresses, personal problems begin surfacing and things start to go really bad really quick. For the first half of this movie, I was mostly enjoying it. All the characters were kind of *******s, but it was pretty well done and I'll watch Jeremy Piven and Thomas Jane in pretty much anything, so I was with it. Then, halfway through, something happens that takes the movie in a different direction that's... a little hard to buy. I never got really onboard with it. It was a little ridiculous, I thought, and all of a sudden I could see why this movie got such bad reviews. It's not a completely worthless movie, there's some great scenic shots, it's got the aforementioned actors and Sasha Grey has a small role and takes her top off. So it wasn't all bad. But I would say it wasn't very good.
