Belated Movie Reviews of 2009, part 2

Well, here we are with a scheduled post. Pretty impressive, huh? And if you're still interested in reading my take on the movies I saw this year, well then you've come to the right place. So, let's get to it.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Review: My personal opinion of the Harry Potter movies is that they're better to see if you haven't read the books. Luckily, I only read the first 3 and even those I don't really remember, so I was going into this one well prepared. The reason these movies are better to see with no prior knowledge is that you can actually appreciate them as movies without constantly thinking about all the stuff they left out or changed from the book version. And so I thought this movie was ok. I don't really remember the details of the story, but I think it went something like: the evil Lord Voldemort is out to get Harry, but with help from his friends and professors and the discovery of some hidden magic secret, he is able to overcome the odds or something like that. I guess they're all pretty much the same, but still they're ok. Actually, I think this was the worst of the Harry Potter movies, because it spent a lot of time trying to prove that they were all teenagers and had hormones and experienced young love and all that shit. I think that stuff is better kept to Twilight movies, because at least in those you know they're going to suck and be completely lacking in plot. So yeah, this movie's actual story suffered as a result of the teenage expository stuff, which was pretty conventional and boring. Nonetheless the Harry Potter movies look cool and there was enough to keep me interested. Maybe I'm just cutting it some slack because LCT seemed to hate it and I like to disagree with him.

Bonus Points: I'm actually going to have to deduct points from this one, because I paid extra money and went to see it in 3-D and the 3-D wasn't that great and ended after the opening scene of like five minutes. Total fucking waste.

Final Score: A middling 3.0 out of 4.7 on the dtro goodness scale. Has some of the good elements of the other Harry Potter movies, but is hurt by too much focus on the characters' love lives. I came to see some crazy magic shit and I really don't care anything about the characters since they're played by terrible child actors with annoying British accents.


District 9

Review: I think the biggest beef I have with this movie is how ludicrously overhyped it was. I have other beefs, which I will soon outline, but this movie is currently #88 on IMDB's top 250 movies...of ALL TIME. C'mon now people, this was a pretty good movie but I just can't fathom why everyone is jizzing themselves just thinking about it. Is it the Peter Jackson connection? Because the Lord of the Rings movies were seriously overrated too. Maybe he just has that effect on people. Anyway, this movie is a twist on the classic alien movie, because it's about aliens coming to earth and actually being less powerful than humans. Apparently their spacecraft broke down in the sky above Johannesburg and all the ruling class died out, leaving the dregs of society to fend for themselves in a makeshift ghetto in South Africa. I have to admit, it's a pretty clever retelling of alien movies and it is pretty interesting through the first two-thirds or so when it's basically a "documentary" centering around the government employee who has to deal with the alien problem and their relocation. That part is pretty good with some minor flaws, one of which is that the faux-documentary thing has been done to death at this point. Christopher Guest movies, The Office, Parks and Recreation, etc. We fucking get it at this point and it's no longer an interesting way to tell a story, but more of a crutch that allows characterization through direct monologues to the camera. Also, in the earlier "good" part of District 9, I found the apartheid parallels pretty heavy handed. I'm all for a good allegory, but this was an obvi-gory that was smacking us in the face saying "Hey guys, remember how fucked up South Africa was and how it can happen to any society and how racism is bad?" Yeah, we fucking get it.

Even with those drawbacks the first 60% or so of the movie was clearly several notches above a typical alien sci-fi movie and quite good. And then the last part of the movie showed up and it all devolved into a typical Hollywood shoot em up, where the two guys who couldn't get along have to band together to take down the bad guys with crazy guns, a bunch of explosions, and a mech suit that would have looked really cool in 1996.

Bonus Points: for the random bursts of extreme violence in the early parts of the movie, when it was still in documentary mode. I find nothing funnier than a bureaucrat reasoning with a giant cockroach looking alien and the alien randomly kicking him 60 feet in the air and shattering his spine. The violence in the early part of the movie was understated and surprising, unlike the stylized garbage at the end.

Final Score: a pretty good 3.8 out of 4.7 on the dtro goodness scale. I gotta give it higher than Star Trek, because it took a lot more creativity to come up with, but it did not live up to either its potential or its hype.


Inglourious Basterds

Review: This movie was off the fucking chain. Seriously, I thought this movie was just completely awesome throughout and I'm definitely not some Tarantino fanboy. It's Quentin Tarantino completely reimagining World War II by having a bunch of Jewish soldiers going around killing and scalping Nazis and then coming up with a crazy plot to kill Hitler. It wasn't perfect: Eli Roth as the "Bear Jew" was pretty horrendous for his few lines and Brad Pitt (who I'm only starting to forgive for the terrible Benjamin Button) walked a fine line between funny and so one-note that it's annoying. Everything else was spot on. I've heard that people complained that Tarantino gets a little too wrapped up in the dialogue and the movie gets bogged down because of it, but in the two long sequences of talking--the showdown in the tavern and Landa's interrogation of the farmer--the dialogue was interesting and served to build up suspense to a high pitch. If you want to see Tarantino get wrapped up in dialogue, go watch the first hour of Death Proof. That dialogue is atrocious, but the dialogue in Basterds was good. Christoph Waltz, the guy who played the villain Hans Landa, was fucking superb throughout the movie being a smarmy, evil, charming dickhead Nazi and pulling it off in several languages. That guy needs to get an Oscar. I guess it was a little annoying when Tarantino winked at the audience a little with his Samuel Jackson voice-over and the big bright 70s letters introducing certain chapters of the movie, but it didn't detract from the film as a whole. The climactic scene in the theater was actually a bit of a let down after such awesome build up, but that's just because it's not quite as good as some of the earlier scenes (particularly the two dialogue-heavy ones mentioned above), but Brad Pitt's revenge on Hans Landa was a satisfying conclusion.

Bonus Points: for shooting Hitler's fucking face off with a machine gun. I think you're kind of wondering the whole time how Tarantino is going to deal with the question of Hitler and what really happened in WWII and then he just says fuck history and kills him in an awesomely gruesome way. Bravo, sir. It's unfortunate that some dumbass kids are going to think that's how WWII really went down, but fuck 'em; they're going to die poor and ignorant anyway.

Final Score: an unprecedented 4.5 out of 4.7 on the dtro goodness scale. I don't really feel like giving anything a perfect score, but this was without doubt the best movie I saw this year. Any faults I find are merely nitpicking, because on the whole it was totally excellent.


Capitalism: A Love Story

Review: Well, it's a Michael Moore movie so you kinda know what to expect at this point. Totally scattered thoughts and narrative at certain points, wildly draw conclusions from evidence that is lacking, and an attack on those goddamn fat cats told with a liberal bent. So Capitalism isn't perfect. In fact, it's almost certainly inferior to Sicko and Bowling for Columbine (and I presume, Roger and Me, which I've never seen) but it is certainly calmer, more focused, and less Moore-ish than Fahrenheit 9/11, which is a good thing. Basically, Moore is trying to say that America's blind adherence to capitalism to the subjugation even of democracy as our highest ideal, is not necessarily that great a thing. It's not that he wants us all to become pinkos or something, just that he wants us to realize what exactly the sick immoral disgusting bastards on Wall St. and in boardrooms did to fuck our economy in the ass and how equally evil and corrupt politicians in our nation's capital are only marginally interested in helping out the majority of the country. Along the way, Moore does bring up some very interesting points--like how Goldman Sachs is basically running this fucking country and how the bailout was maybe not as necessary as we thought and is not at all being overseen by government watchdogs. This stuff is pretty good: edifying and rabble-rousing at the same time.

The problem is when Moore tries to pull off his everyman act. Empty displays of anger and justice-seeking like being a dick outside Wall St. office buildings to make citizens arrests in the name of the American people is just a waste of his and our time. Also, the whole scene where he has the trader try to explain derivatives and such to explain how debt became a valued commodity in the American marketplace is just insulting. He asks the guy to explain some admittedly complicated financial stuff and then constantly interrupts him with these "Gee willickers, this sure is confusing and hard to understand for us regular folks on Main St." dickish questions. I get his point, i.e. how the hell did our economy move from manufacturing and service to becoming dependent on labyrinthine financial workings of the Ivy League super-elite. But treat the audience with a little more respect than that. At least TRY to explain some of it and don't act like you're too dumb (because you're not) and we're too dumb to possibly rap our little middle or lower class heads around this stuff.

Bonus Points: for including that economic and philosophical wizard Wallace Shawn, and finally giving him the platform to expound his opinions. Actually, I'm not sure if this is positive or negative points. It was just odd and confusing.

Final Score: a decent 3.7 out of 4.7 on the dtro goodness scale. It had its flaws but I walked out of the theater wanting to skin a bank executive alive after boiling him in a vat for several hours to make his skin more loose and pliant and therefore easier to remove from his muscular system. And that's a good thing.



The Hurt Locker

Review: I think this was my second favorite movie of the year. It's set a couple years ago and is basically just following three guys around Baghdad as they serve their tour as bomb defusers. It is not especially romanticized or even really dramatized with a ton of personal looks at the three main characters. There is one brief "I gotta get out of here" speech near the end, but it is muted and fitting with the events of the movie. Otherwise, for the most part I think it is an attempt to accurately depict what life is like for some soldiers over in Iraq and it definitely seems very realistic. What dramatizing there is in the movie happens from the innate drama of being in the middle of a fucking war and is not shoved into the movie in other ways. My only minor issues were that I found the little Iraqi kid that the main character takes a shine to quite annoying and, in fact, that whole relationship walks the line of feeling forced and sentimental but I think it works ok. Also, I prefer the conclusion of the movie, which is something like-the main character comes home to the US but is really anxious and bored and actually can't wait to get back to Iraq because he's basically a crazy-ass adrenaline junkie who doesn't really work as well in any other setting than the fucked up one that is Iraq. I certainly prefer this finale to the "soldier comes home, can't readjust, is haunted by war experiences, his life sucks at home" finish that has been covered adequately in numerous other war movies. But it still just reinforces my impression that a lot of people in the military are either stupid or insane or both and have joined for those reasons. Oh well, maybe that's just me.

Bonus Points: for immediately killing the only two actors who are really recognizable. Guy Pearce gets his head exploded inside of a bomb-defusing spaceman suit in the opening scene, and Ralph Fiennes gets shot in the neck a couple minutes after appearing as a British special forces guy. I liked that for some reason.

Final Score: A very good 4.25 out of 4.7 on the dtro goodness scale. Just a very good little movie. I don't know if it really got a lot of attention, because it didn't have any big stars, but it is definitely worth checking out.

Alright, folks, that's it. In summation, Inglourious Basterds was awesome, as was The Hurt Locker. District 9 is worth watching, just don't expect to see one of the greatest movies of all time. And...you know there's no point to summing it all up. It seems that I didn't give any of these movies a truly terrible review, which is disappointing, because bad reviews are much better than positive ones. It's always more fun (and especially so for a pessimistic hater like me) to rip on stuff than to praise it. And so I want to leave you with this: in the past two years there have been 10 movies nominated for the Academy Award for best picture. This is the award of awards for movies, and watch them or no (and whatever your take on the idea of deciding a "winner" in a field that is so overtly subjective) I still think they're a pretty big deal. 2 of those 10 movies, i.e. 20% of them, were Juno and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Now, I know I just said movie opinions were inherently a subjective and personal thing, but objectively speaking those 2 movies were the most wretched piles of festering dogshit committed to film in recent memory. Oh, and also Mad Money--worst movie ever.

Belated Movie Reviews of 2009, part 1

Well in my laziness of not updating this blog for months on end I have neglected to keep you, dear reader, fully informed of my opinions on movies that I went to see in the theater this year. By my reckoning, I went to see 9 movies since I last did a movie review post. Now since I know you have all been clamoring to hear my personal take on a select group of movies I actually went to see in the theater this year, most of which I only vaguely remember, I have decided to condense these 9 movies down into one small megapost. And away we go:



Star Trek

Review:This was a pretty good movie. A bit run-of-the-mill action thillerish, but at the high end of that spectrum. The effects and action in this movie were first rate, the acting was Oscar-worthy (jk lolz), and there were even some shout outs to the true Trekkies out there. Wait, on second thought, I didn't like that at all. This was the Star Trek movie that was supposed to be a mainstream hit and it was, and still the producers/director felt they had to make some sort of homage to old Star Trek shit with a Leonard Nimoy cameo (and frankly the only Nimoy cameo that was worth a damn was on The Springfield Files). They didn't have to do that. The reason this movie was a hit was because it wasn't a boring pile of space nerdery like everything else Star Trek and those who took extreme interest in Star Trek (those eponymous Trekkies of douchefag fame) prior to this film deserve to be ostracized and shunned from society--not pandered to. Also, I think the plot was a bit jumbled up and relied on time travel and had some holes, but I can't really remember that at this point.

Bonus Points: for a Simon Pegg appearance. That guy is a legend based on Hot Fuzz alone.

Final Score: A solid 3.7 out of 4.7 on the dtro goodness scale. It was about all you could ask for in a summer blockbuster type movie.


Angels & Demons

Review: This movie was meh. I don't think it's quite as terrible as people make it out to be and I think the same is true of The DaVinci Code. The problem with these movies is that Dan Brown is such a good story plotter and such a mediocre prose writer that these books were read by everybody. Now when stupid people read their first book since 7th grade they have a tendency to believe "THis is the bestest book evar!!1!" And so, because the general populace is generally worse at judging the quality of books than the quality of movies (because people see way more movies than read books), they get all upset when a mediocre movie is made from a book they considered to be awesome. Those Dan Brown books (and I've only actually read A&D) were ok, but they took on some sort of cultural significance far beyond their actual literary merit. Also, they very much relied on omniscient narration of a character's thoughts, which you can only do in a movie if Morgan Freeman has time to lend his voice.

Anyway, the movie had a solid hour long stretch in the middle that was paced quickly with enough suspense and action to keep me well entertained. Unfortunately, the movie was well over 2 hours and droned on and on about "science vs. faith" which is a pretty uninteresting argument. Science one that argument a long time ago in my book by using "facts" and "reality." Maybe that debate plays better in the heartland, I don't know.

Bonus Points: for Tom Hanks cutting his hair a bit and being a little less creepy, but it was really only a very little less creepy so not a ton of bonus points.

Final Score: A meh 2.7 out of 4.7 on the dtro goodness scale. Some good parts in the middle, but it really is a tough type of book to make a movie out of and the science/faith stuff was heavy-handed and unnecessary. Also, I think I dislike Ewan McGregor, but I'm not sure. Have to get back to you on that one.



The Hangover

Review: Pretty standard party/drinking/road trip type movie made a little more interesting by being told backwards linearly, i.e. 3 guys have to figure out what happened to their soon to be married friend who is lost in Vegas by piecing together clues from a night they can' really remember. That sounds pretty cheesy right? Well it is, but there are still enough funny parts to keep you interested through pretty much the whole thing. I'm not sure why this turned out to be such a massively popular comedy; maybe it was for lack of competition, because it really wasn't that funny. But like I said, there were some funny parts and enough Zach Galifianakis to make it worth checking out. I gotta say though, Andy Bernard was not funny, but actually annoying as hell throughout this entire movie. Also, the setup is unbelievably unimaginative: it's like Bachelor Party meets Road Trip!--this is actually my guess for how it was pitched to the studio.

Bonus Points: for Zach Galifianakis, who really carries the movie and is just generally hilarious anyway. Also, for the pictures at the end and particularly the one of Zach G. getting a beej from a really old looking whore.

Final Score: A middling 3.1 out of 4.7 on the dtro goodness scale. Ok, not great.



Up

Review: This was the widely praised pixar release of the year, because apparently those guys can do no wrong. Well, this fucker sure as shit wasn't WALL-E but it was still pretty decent. It's about a grumpy old man who always wanted to travel with his wife and finally gets a chance to do so after she dies by tying a bunch of balloons to his house and floating to South America. Along the way he is accompanied by a grating little boy scout, who perfectly captures the spirit of America with his obesity and desire for rewards without accomplishment. Anyway, it's a pretty good concept for a movie and I can't knock the pixar guys for lack of imagination, but there are some problems. For one, that "girl" at the beginning is clearly a little boy meaning either that the Ed Asner character is gay or his dead "wife" was somewhere in the T part of the LGBTQ scale. Either way, seems a bit risque for a kids movie. Also, the movie was really just audaciously ridiculous at times, none of which I can recall now but which made me shake my head in the theater. And then I realized that me and mamatro were the only people there who weren't either little kids or their parents and I had to shake my head at myself.

Bonus Points: for the talking dog collar thingies, which were actually very funny and a good way of dealing with the concept of talking animals while still letting the movie exist in a certain realm of believability (although, c'mon, he floated to South America in a house so talking animals wouldn't be a huge stretch).

Final Score: A solid if unspectacular 3.6 out of 4.7 on the dtro goodness scale. It was very creative and had some funny moments, but was hampered by ridiculousness (gotta keep the kids guessing) and one-note characters (b/c kids do not get the idea of complex personalities). Not bad at all for a childrens movie, but well short of Pixar's best in my opinion.

Ok, well I was gonna do one big post but I'm tired and this is taking too long. Tomorrow, in part 2, I review the Harry Potter movie, District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Michael Moore's Capitalism, and The Hurt Locker. That post will feature my 2 favorite movies of the year (among those I saw in the theater at least). As a hint, they weren't Harry Potter, Michael Moore or District 9.

These people hate our way of life...

...and so the best way to show them that we as democratic freedom loving Americans cannot be effected by them is to hold secret military tribunals and then execute them without due process.



So says Rudolph Q. Giuliani, self-proclaimed King of 9/11.

Rudy just go get the 09 patch sewn on to your Yankees 2627-Time World Champs! jacket and shut the fuck up.

Refueling on Sportswriter Hate

Today I will be hating on Bill Simmons--ESPN's "Sports Guy," which is undoubtedly one of the most clever nicknames ever devised for a sportswriter. Here's the thing about Simmons: you know what you're going to get with him. Too many pop culture references aimed at people in their 30s that he seems to think are hilarious but which just get grating and gimmicky after a while. Sycophantic "mailbags" where his legions of mindless fans send him emails with the general outline of 'question about sports thinly veiled as annoying praise of Simmons and an attempt to get him to like me if only in a pseudo-internety kind of liking way, phrased exactly how he would phrase a paragraph in his own column.' Boston shit. Stuff just reminds him of the 86 Celtics all the time and he will randomly just throw away column space on the Patriots at times. Podcasts that are occasionally interesting and funny, unless he calls his buddy Jacko the Yankee fan--having listened to a couple of these Jacko podcasts I can safely say that my personal hell, if there is a hell to which I shall be relegated at the time of my dying, is listening to a Red Sox and a Yankee fan, neither of whom have any knowledge of baseball beyond shit that Dan Shaughnessy or Mike Lupica would write, debate who is more worried about their ridiculously wealthy well-run teams that are virtual locks for playoff spots year-in and year-out.

But the thing is--Simmons is not that bad. He's a decent writer and he genuinely has some interesting insights about sports sometimes (but not baseball, he should just ignore baseball at this point) and he's kinda funny. And so, despite the reservations about him that I have listed above, I do check out Simmons' page at ESPN on a fairly regular basis.

And then he goes and writes a steaming pile of shit like this. In case you don't want to click through, his column is called "Running on sports-hate empty"; hence the title of my post here. It's basically a post about how 3 of the athletes he hates the most--Kobe Bryant, A-Rod, and Peyton Manning have earned his begrudging respect and forced him to reconsider his "hate" for them. Fine, whatever. Pretty trite, but they can't all be doozies. The real problem here, though, is not the idea, but the content. E.G.:

"If you're not familiar with the term, "sports hate" is an underrated part of fandom. Everyone has guys they don't like, and more importantly, guys they enjoy not liking. The reasons are unique to us. There doesn't have to be anything rational about it. Sports hate can be triggered by one incident, one slight, one game gone wrong, anything."

If I'm not familiar with the term? Huh? As if this is a term in common parlance or is regularly used by a certain group of individuals here. I think it's pretty self-motherfucking-evident what you're talking about so don't treat me like I'm stupid and don't try to make "sports hate" seem like a "term" that you or someone else has coined because it's not. It's two words that mean what they say: hate related to the realm of sports. God, don't be such a douche Simmons.

Anyway, he then proceeds to talk about A-Rod finally being clutch in the postseason this year, because like many "stupid fans" he doesn't understand the concept of small sample sizes and randomness that influence any human endeavor, but in particular the sport of baseball. If you're not familiar with the term, "stupid fans" they are an unfortunate part of fandom. Everyone knows fans that are clearly less intelligent than them when it comes to thinking, writing, or talking about sports. You may even enjoy being smarter than them about sports, but it certainly is frustrating when they have a huge national platform. But yeah, "stupid fans:" I'm trademarking that shit. Just coined it here on the spot.

Our friend Billy then talks about how Peyton Manning's continued goodness at football proves that he's really good at football and Kobe Bryant won the basketballing championship of the national association or some such thing--not sure what sports league he's talking about there. And then he drops this gem:

"Read those previous three paragraphs again. (Actually, read them for me. I am covered in smoke because my flesh is on fire. I can't see my laptop. [ed. note: jokes, ha!]) Imagine you're me. You have a sports column. You're a passionate guy. You care a little too much about sports. You're all about the Boston teams. You love getting riled up about players who you feel are either selfish, overrated, attention hogs, bad teammates, transparent or whatever. You always believed that Manning would choke when it mattered, that A-Rod was a fraud, that Kobe's selfishness would trump his talents. These realities are no longer true.

Do I feel empty inside? Yeah, a little."

And bam I stopped reading. Literally haven't gotten any farther than that sentence, because it just shows when you give a Boston sports fan a national column. Boston sports fans have been blessed with a string of very successful teams over the last decade, and so to a certain extent the appeal that Simmons' writing probably originally had as the voice of the lovable loser, who approaches sports with some hope but a healthy amount of pessimism, is now irrelevant. There is no more claims to years of suffering to be offered up by the people in New England, and they probably miss that a bit. But what they miss, and what Simmons misses (if I may put on my armchair psychologist's cap for a minute) is not the suffering per se. It is the ability to Lord that suffering over everyone else. If you're arrogant and obnoxious (and Massholes can't really help that--it is stamped into the very fiber of their beings) when your teams are good then you're just a huge fucking dickhead. That is what Boston fans are at this point, and why they have surpassed fans of my own native city in national detestability. But if you are arrogant and obnoxious when your teams are bad, and are specifically arrogant about the badness of said teams, well then you get to feel superior to others while not being directly hate-able since your dickishness is tinged with a bit of sympathy for your suffering. The problem of course is that I really think Simmons and others of his brood actually think that their suffering is more deeply felt or more important than that of other people.

And so no, Bill Simmons, I will not imagine I'm you. I will not try to put myself in your shoes and feel your "sports suffering" (another gem I just came up with; refer to my glossary if you are not familiar with this term). I have my own thank you very much and it is not better or worse than yours; it just is. So don't lay some Bostony guilt trip on me about how you feel empty inside. I already knew you were empty inside, because you see, sir, you have no soul.