Harry Potter and the Half-Blood PrinceReview: 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.
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