I wasn't expecting much going into this film. I'm aware of director Michael Bay's history and his habit of making mindless popcorn films with huge explosions, scantily-clad women, and awful cheesy dialogue. However, I thought the first film was okay for what it was, so figured maybe I would like the sequel. I was dead wrong. "Revenge of the Fallen" is the most ridiculous campy, poorly-written and poorly-directed piece of garbage to come out this year. The acting by Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox is average, and the special effects are extremely well done. That's about the only saving grace for this film.
The writing is so unbelievable you almost have to see it to believe it. At one point a character actually utters the line "not on my watch." No one in the history of the military has ever said this outside of a film. Reading over the screenplay, you would think it was some terrible Transformers fan faction written by a tenth grader and posted to the Internet. The dialogue is HORRIBLE. This would be a great movie if it was targeted to 9 year olds, but the overt sexual references and language suggest an older demographic. Maybe it's because Bay is trying to please a wide range of people, and maybe that's why we have jokes made about Transformer Testicles and there's a scene where a transformer (with a Jersey accent much less) tries to hump Megan Fox's leg. What possible reason is this robot trying to hump her leg? Is that the way they procreate? There is ZERO excuse for it other than a cheap laugh. And that's ALL the jokes are, cheap laughs. I honestly would not have been surprised to see a transformer fart in this film, or maybe a scene where a transformer gets high. It wouldn't matter if it made sense because an intoxicated transformer would be HILARIOUS. But don't worry, because there's plenty of scenes of Sam's mother accidentally getting high at college and proceeding to follow the Robin Williams/Jim Carey acting formula of physical humor. Then there are Skids and Mudflap - two Decepticons who can't read, speak in "jive," act like gangster-wannabes, and fight a lot. One of them even has a gold tooth (I am not making that up). I am one of the last people you will meet who cares about things being PC or will ever claim anything is racist unless it is blatant, but this was a BLATANT stereotype. I cannot believe this made it into the movie. I wouldn't call it racist, but if these characters had actually been human, the NAACP would have freaked out.
This movie is also insanely long, at a running time of 2.5 hours. This probably could have been avoided if there wasn't so much slow motion footage of people running. I was miserable after the first 45 minutes. Bay should have cut at a minimum, the last half hour off of the movie. The action scenes, while good, were way too confusing. The robots are so complex you can't tell what is happening since it's so fast and you can't figure out Transformers: "Revenge of the Fallen" is not Armageddon. It is not Bad Boys. It is definitely not the Rock. Say what you will about those films, they at least had somewhat decent plots and required some brain activity. This movie is nothing but pure mindless action, awful jokes, and gratuitous shots of Megan Fox (and only one of those is a good thing).
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My wife and I attended an early press screening for the third Ice Age installment two weeks ago and had a wonderful time. The film easily tops the second outing of the series, and is right on par with the first - with just the right mixture of new characters and settings vs. the older ones we've all grown to love (especially Scrat. I can watch a whole movie with this guy).
This time around, Manny and Ellie are expecting a baby mammoth, something that leads to unexpected responds from Diego and Sid. When Sid decides to become a parent himself in return, he steals three giant eggs he accidentally bumps into, only to later realize they're dinosaur eggs that belong to a pretty angry mother. When mother-dinosaur kidnaps Sid, it's up to Manny and friends to return him home safely. Adventures ensue as they find out that underneath their icy world lives a land filled with enormous and sometimes menacing dinosaurs, one which our friends would need to cross in order to rescue Sid.
Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is cute but not insulting, the visuals are stunning and if you forgive the obvious historical loophole (there were no dinosaurs during the Ice Age) you can actually have quite a good time. The dinosaurs add a lot to the plot, and there's actually a very cool, nice sense of adventure throughout the film, one that was somewhat missing (in my opinion) from the previous installment. All this adds to a fun and thrilling experience - alongside the visuals, jokes and general good atmosphere.
To sum things up - Ice Age 3 is an above average animated film, that'll appeal to grown-ups and kids alike. I gave it 9 out of 10.
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The year is 1933, it's the Great Depression. A time for the desperate to do the unthinkable. Crime was on the rise and people were suffering. For John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) it was a time of infinite possibilities and opportunities. To combat the sharp incline in rampant criminal activity, J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) forms the FBI, led by Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). Together they target Dillinger as public enemy number one. Relying on new methods of intelligence gathering (such as tracking the purchase location of a coat or recording phone conversations), the firepower of trained gunmen, and his own relentless nature, Purvis gets closer and closer to Dillinger and company.
"I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars... and you. What else do you need to know?" - John Dillinger. Johnny Depp IS John Dillinger. He's perfect for the role. The cool, confident and almost cocky nature of the character is really portrayed on screen (such as bragging to reporters about his bank jobs and teasing Purvis and agents who are after him). It's a look of how a man lived and succeeded in a hard time. Dillinger was a man that lived in the moment as only a man in the depression could. From the worlds on John Dillinger, "I'm to busy having fun today to even think about tomorrow." Who knows what tomorrow might bring? Bale also succeeds in his role and is a solid counterpart against Depp. It works well having two top, well known actors opposing each other on screen.
The film is directed by Michael Mann who brought us such films as Heat, The Insider, and Collateral and he adds another good film to his resume with this one. The action sequences, bank heists, and shootouts in this film are probably the biggest highlights. After all, this is from the same guy who gave us one of the most famous and arguably the best shootout of all time in Heat. The sequences are cool, slick, and gritty. Excellence at it's best. (I have to throw in a note of praise for the superb shootout at the Little Bohemia lodge, which was an extremely impressive scene)
The cat and mouse aspect makes it intriguing, but I think more could have been added to it. It just feels as if something was missing. Much of the film focuses on the love story between Dillinger and Billie Frechette (Marion Cottillard) It's also interesting to see the other gangsters of this time and how they relate to Dillinger and the criminal world.
Much has been made of Public Enemies being filmed on HD video, mostly complaints. I must say that at times, the picture looked amazing. The night sequences, especially looked beautifully slick and realistic. I loved the cinematography here. The cars, headlights, street lights, and everything looked fantastic. Other times, it doesn't look as good. It just felt as if something didn't look right. I'm not sure what to think about this.
One problem I had with this film would have to be the lack of character depth in many of the characters. At times, it seems as if we are expected to know and understand the characters before going to see the film because it is a real life story. But as a film, it could have developed the characters more to help us (and those who know nothing about Dillinger, his life, or Purvis and the FBI) understand them better. Another problem was some of the historical inaccuracies. Many things portrayed in the film, do not happen as they did in real life. Many sequences are just out of order. I know the filmmakers had to know about this and just tried to work it in as best as they could. It's not a documentary, it's a movie.
I really enjoyed Public Enemies. It's a solid crime drama and a good summer film. I understand expectations were through the roof, but that's a little hard to ask for. It's a really good film, but not quite a great one... The action is fun, the story is interesting. Maybe instead of being a very good film, it could have became a really great film if more was put into the characters? I'm not sure. It just felt as if something were missing. But who can knock a film for still being really good?

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(Synopsis) Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian Fitzgerald (Jason Patric) have just been informed that their young daughter Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) has leukemia, and that she only has a few years to live. The doctor suggests to the parents that they try an unorthodox medical procedure of producing another child in a test-tube that would be a perfect match as a donor for Kate. Sara will try anything to save Kate, and they have a new baby Anna (Abigail Breslin) to be used as a donor for Kate. The first thing they use is blood from the umbilical cord for Kate. As years go on, the doctors must take bone marrow from Anna to give to Kate. At age 11, the next thing Anna must give to her sister is a kidney. Anna has had enough of all of these medical procedures, and she decides to sue her parents for medical emancipation and the right to decide how her body will be used. The whole family is being torn apart by Anna's decision because everyone knows what will happen to Kate if she doesn't get a new kidney.
(My Comment) Everyone knows from the movie trailer that the story is about a young girl who has cancer. You would think that it would be a depressing movie, but you would be wrong. It is a story of some of the choices we make in life. Having a test-tube baby as body parts for another child was a choice made by the parents. Anna wanting to stop giving her body to her sister was a choice. As with all choices, there are consequences. Kate will die without a new kidney. There are many very hard choices in life and in death that we must make, and this is a good movie to show you the way. Diaz as the pragmatic lawyer who was fighting to the very end for her daughter lost focus on life, and the rest of her family. I believe that this is Diaz's best part and performance as an actress. Sofia Vassilieva played Kate, who was in pain for most of her life. Sofia played Kate so well that you could see the helplessness in her eyes as she fights for her life. Anna was also part of this pain, and Abigail Breslin played this part as a professional. Actually, the whole cast was outstanding throughout the film. I loved the collaged scrapbook with voice-over and flashbacks that Kate made to give to her mother. This is a good movie to see with your loved ones. (New Line Cinema, Run Time 1:49, Rated PG-13) (10/10)
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We went into this movie more or less out of despair; the cinema offerings seemed uniformly lousy and we simply wanted to see a movie that looked like fun. This one looked stupid: I'd seen Betty White promoting the movie on Jimmy Fallon's show and the scene shown was idiotic, though it did have a couple of amusing lines. Well, we were all pleasantly surprised. The outcome of the plot might be predictable, but the road getting there is surprisingly sharp and entertaining. There are quite a few witty lines and exchanges, and the delivery and timing of the two stars and, of course, of Betty White are just about perfect. Both of the lead characters have surprises in their backgrounds to reveal, and the settings are beautiful. There are one or two scenes that are clunkers, but even the dopey episode with White's Grandma Annie doing a ritualistic dance in the woods ends up having some relevance to a later plot event. The movie is well thought-out and well executed, and the actors create characters who engage us, even if we don't know anyone quite like them in our own lives.

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If you like the tried-and-true formula of Woody Allen's movies, such as the pessimism, the sense of persecution, the "nobody understands the way life works, except me" point of view, then you will feel right at home with this movie, which may be seen as an extension of the HBO Larry David show. There are some funny, insightful and inspired comments throughout the movie, variations of the lines found in most of the post-Annie Hall films Woody Allen has made. This movie will have a very limited audience, will be popular in only a few select markets, and mildly amusing, or confusing in most of the rest of the country. The acting is excellent, the actors were very well cast, all of this making it look as if these actors are part of a long term ensemble.

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I went into this hoping to learn some shocking secret to the food industry that would change my mind about what I ate. Instead, I got a lightweight group of shots of corporate buildings or industrial production that did not expose anything. Yes, it's true, there are large processing companies that process a lot of food. So what??? The suggestion here is that because they are big, something evil must be lurking behind those doors. But no such evidence is provided. The worst they could come up with were subtitles that said "such and such a company refused to grant us an interview!" Wooooooooo! How incriminating. The fact is, there is no real shocking truth revealed by this film about the food industry. In fact, there own arguments support the processors. For example, they site the well known instance a couple decades ago about the child that died from a Jack In The Box hamburger. One instance. Given the billions of portions of beef served since then, and not another instance of this has occurred, I would argue the food industry has done a great job of containing that risk. Additionally, they clearly hide facts about the Monsanto case, showing selected single sided arguments, without allowing Monsanto to voice their side of the story. They attempt to make a farmer who was being prosecuted by Monsanto look like a victim, showing only selected clips of his testimony in court, and not Monsanto's side. I'd expect at least to let them speak and tear them apart if they didn't have a point, but to exclude the other sides perspective makes the whole movie seem like a charade. At the end, all I learned was that big companies control the processing and feed animals a lot of corn. I'm one of them, because I enjoyed my popcorn throughout this movie, but not the fact that I spent $13 to see it. A waste of time.
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Wirkola surely spent time studying the genre of zombie movies thoroughly before setting to work on "Død Snø", paying endless tributes to the great classics of the genre throughout the movie, before grabbing it and tossing it over the top and into a strange land beyond.

The movie has so many things speaking in favor of it. It has a well thought-out plot, it has all the wonderful stereotypes of a horror movie in place, and more than anything, it follows the rules of the genre to the note.

From the barely glimpse horror in the early phases, to the ominous messenger who lays the groundwork for the story, to the stalking danger in the dark, and all the way to the outright shotgun-and-chainsaw last stand, Wirkola hardly hits a single note wrong.

If the region of Finnmark should have one national-romantic epic to its name, it should be this movie.

This movie is simply a must-see for the zombie affectionate!

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"Land of the Lost" is another in a long line of old TV shows lazily packaged into summer movies, too dumbed-down for fans of the original show and nothing all that memorable for those younger viewers coming into it for the first time. There is no doubt it will join the class ("Bewitched"-which Will Ferrell also was in, "Dukes of Hazard" and "Wild Wild West") of films so bad that they make "The Brady Bunch Movie" look like the "Ben-Hur" of the genre. There is just zero reason to care about anything in this movie. Will Ferrell, you should have known better.
Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a paleontologist disgraced by what others call his nonsensical theories about space-time vortexes. The only one who cares to believe him is Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel), a research assistant from one of those fancy British universities who encourages him to keep working on his tachyon thingie-majigger, a device that finds tachyon particles that somehow allow people to jump between worlds. They find the most amount of the stuff in a crappy little souvenir shop run by a redneck named Will (Danny McBride), and before they know it Marshall, Holly, and Will are traveling back to another dimension that's all desert. The place is complete with T-Rex, creepy-crawly bugs, a bunch of things from our world littered about like a stretch limo, Bobs Big Boy and Golden Gate Bridge, and a primate named Chaka (Jorma Taccone) who befriends them and helps them navigate their way back to their dimension.
What needs to get lost is the screenplay by Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas. When Matt Lauer, playing himself, is the funniest thing in a movie, you know that something went horribly wrong. The laughs are childishly inane. Ferrell is forced to embarrass himself considerably, in one scene drenching himself in, and yes, even drinking dinosaur urine. Dino poop and gross insect infections also get high regard. Then you have Chaka, a supposedly lovable primate who's big comic bit is molestation. Hilarious! And this is the big-laugh stuff. The rest is hard to even remember. That this movie manages any chuckles at all is due to Ferrell and McBride's improvisation abilities. Ferrell is the arrogant goof-off and McBride the brash sidekick, but they're facing an uphill battle with this screenplay.
And the plot…wait, what plot? And what character development for that matter? It's all very basic, aimless, and easy to follow, except you'll be too bored to do so. Characters run around like idiots, dinosaurs and insects chase after them, not much happens. And when not being chased, the aimlessness doesn't stop, it just gets more persistent. A scene where Marshall, Will, and Chaka sit around in a stupor getting high off of some coconut drink (yes, this is a family movie) is unbelievably drawn out, unnecessary, and above all, pointless. Finally in the third act the Slestaks, reptilian villains bent on world domination, start to put their plan into effect but even then it's too little, too late to care. The special effects are cheesy. I'm assuming that was the plan cause the show was the exact same way but what you can see at home for free and what your willing to pay for are two different things. A dinosaur against an obvious green screen isn't much fun and little green reptilian men in obvious costumes and masks that barely move, other than to open and close their mouths, are hard to take seriously.
"Land of the Lost" is just lost, misguided in every way, starting with even deciding to make the movie in the first place. It deserves to be shunned and left to be the summer's first big box-office bomb. Ferrell, McBride, and Matt Lauer are the only things that keep it from being horribly unwatchable but not from being one of the very worst of the summer and the year thus far.

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