SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE (a review)

SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE (a review)

So this is another movie about someone dating someone they think is too good for them. I've also reviewed THE TRUTH ABOUT THE AVERAGE MAN (where a guy has his friend pretend to be mentally challanged so he can be with a girl he thinks is too good for him) and I COULD NEVER BE YOUR WOMAN (where an older woman dates a younger man and is constantly insecure about it). How did this one fare compared to the others?

The story: Kirk (Jay Baruchel) is insecure. He isn't proud of his job at airport security, he's never really done anything, his last girlfriend dumped him and his parents seem to still like her and her new bo' more than him. Then he meets Molly (Alice Eve), who not only is beautiful but also seems to have done everything Kirk couldn't imagine -- she was a lawyer but left it to pursue something she loved more and is now a very successful party planner, she has traveled, she has a great apartment, and she has dated other hot, successful people. No one -- including Kirk's friends and family -- think he is good enough for her and the movie is about him struggling with his insecurity.

Um...yeah. So this movie, like I COULD NEVER BE YOUR WOMAN, is all about a person being insecure even when the other person really isn't giving them any reason to be. It's not like the girl is flirting with other guys or ignoring him or doing anything to make him think she isn't into him. And I get that insecurity is tough to shake and it can be self-destructive, etc -- but as a movie it's pretty boring. It's the same note again and again -- he's insecure, all his friends say he isn't good enough, yada yada yada. There are some laughs and some decent moments, but it just feels like the same thing over and over until late in the second act when Molly reveals that she is dating him because her ex- cheated on her and she thought he would be safe and that he wouldn't hurt her. For me, that was a cool moment because instead of just him (and his friends) thinking that he isn't good enough it really is that BOTH of them don't think he's good enough. And if that had come earlier (by midpoint at the latest) it could have been a really interesting movie. Instead it comes way too late, only after we've sat through an entire second act of the same thing over and over and over.

Still, it wasn't horrible. But it wasn't great either.

*** neutral ***

a post about those Duke Haters...

From an ESPN special on JJ Redick (Duke 2001-2005, one Final Four, National Player of the Year). At one point Travis Clay of CBS Sportsline called Redick the "most hated current athlete in America."[

OVERNIGHT (documentary) (a review)

OVERNIGHT (documentary) (a review)

This is a documentary about Troy Duffy, a Los Angeles bartender who sold his first script for $1M to Miramax that launched him as a filmmaker and his band to superstardom...except it didn't and this documentary chronicles the rise and crash and burn of this writer/director/musician in Hollywood.

The story: the movie starts and Duffy has just sold his first script to Miramax in a $1M deal where Harvey Winestein evens says he'll buy him the bar he works at. He will get to direct the movie and his band will ecord the sound track. But then things go wrong. His in-your-face attitude and ego cause clashes with everyone around him -- with Miramax executives, with his agents, and finally with his friends and family. Eventually he is able to make his movie, only to take it to the Cannes Film Festival only to see it go unsold to distributors.

Okay, well, that's it. Not much to add about the movie. It is a fascinating look at at a young man who gets a big break and how everything falls apart. I actually don't think his story is that different from a lot of people who get a break in Hollywood only to see it not progress the way they wanted. One thing left out (because the documentary was finished in 2004) was that the movie, THE BOONDOCK SAINTS, did well enough on home video that he got to make a sequel. So maybe there's a little more hope for him than the movie implies...not that he necessarily deserves it.

*** RECOMMEND ****

THE TRUTH ABOUT AVERAGE GUYS (a review)

THE TRUTH ABOUT AVERAGE GUYS (a review)

How bad can a movie be made and still be pretty good? This movies seems to be trying to answer that question. Because it is really bad, but it is still pretty good.

The story: pretty standard stuff -- an average guy likes his hot co-worker. He tries schemes to get closer to her, but she still doesn't notice him. When he finds out that she has a mentally handicapped sister, he lies and tells her his brother is also mentally handicapped and then gets his friend to pretend to the lie so he can get close to her. Eventually, of course, the lie will be exposed, etc, etc.

So the actual story is pretty standard stuff. It's a rom-com formula where the protagonist uses a creative lie (that his friend is his mentally handicapped brother) so he can get close to the girl. And that part to the movie is okay, if completely by the numbers. What makes the movie worth watching is the scenes among the group of guys. Just like in apatow movies, it's these scenes with the friends who are both supportive and ripping on each other that are the best -- they have the best energy, the biggest laughs and even hit on an occasional true thing. For those scenes alone (with a decent but not special story) the movies gets --

Okay, before I give the movie it's recommend I have to talk about how badly this movie was made. How bad is it? There's camera noise. Seriously. There is camera noise. So what's camera noise? Well, in a film camera you have a spool of film that is pulled down and run past the lens and then respooled on the other side of the camera, and while it is doing this it makes a small amount of noise, noise that the sound microphones will pick up almost every time. And one of the first things filmmakers do is get rid of the sound. It's why most people don't know about camera noise -- because every professional film gets rid of it, or masks it, comepletely. Here it is everywhere. It's even in shots that don't need sound. For instance there's an exterior shot with a guy walking up to the house and the only noise you hear is camera noise? Seriously? You have it even on an MOS shot? You didn't just cut it in post and lay over a couple seconds of ambiant sound???? OMFG! And once you hear it once in the movie you begin to notice it again and again and again -- in dialog scenes (where it can be hard to remove) to MOS to everything else. It's like they did no sound editing on the film at all.

And it's this lack of attention to detail that hurts the film. A lot. For instance, there are dialog scenes where there are weird gaps in the dialog where one person speaks and the next person waits to say their response. Waits a lot. In a pro film, you would have coverage and be able to cut and tighten the dialog. Here, nope. And for a film that is basically dialog driven this kills those scenes.

Arggg! I could go on. This is a movie that has problems all the way through it. Huge, amateur problems. It really feels like a movie made by people still in film school. Like their first year of film school. And yet, I'll give it up that overall the movie was enjoyable. But if you watch it don't listen for the camera noise, because once you near it it will distract from almost every scene. Or make a drinking game out of it. A very, very big drinking game.

I will say that the writing is pretty solid. Not spectacular, but solid. The one place where it lapses is the title -- the truth about average guys -- because it never really talks about this truth until the very end, which is epsecially weird since there are plenty of group of guy scenes where they could talk about this truth. Now maybe the title came after the movie was made, but it's a shame because the title implies a better, more interesting movie that the filmmakers never quite get to.

*** rental recommend (if you like Apatow movies) ***

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE (a review)

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE (a review)

So this is the story about four guys who are at unhappy stages in their lives and go back in time accidentally and find themselves caught in a mess where they kind of have to relive their lives, but also change them and one of them is disappearing because he's actually a kid and won't be born if they don't get back to the future. Did I say "Back To the Future"? I meant back to the present. But, yes, this is basically the raunchy guy-comedy version of BACK TO THE FUTURE.

So is it any good. Um, a little. There are some laughs, there are some little moments, a couple lines of dialog. The problem is there just isn't anything great. There are no BIG laughs and worst of all -- there ins't anything cool about it. And that's the big problem, because if you are going to call the movie something like "Hot Tub Time Machine" it can't just be a decent guy-comedy, it's going to have to be as smart and funny and cool as BACK TO THE FUTURE and the best of the best of Apatow all rolled into one. And this just isn't there.

Now that isn't to say that HOT TUB TIME MACHINE is horrible. It just isn't great. If you're trolling for a movie on cable or looking for something to rent, it'll do fine. But as movie theater fare goes, it just doesn't have enough oomph. (Notice how I didn't say "heat." Puns = death.)

*** maybe a rental ****

So let's compare for a moment since my dinner is cooling the twin accidental time travel movies, BACK TO THE FUTURE and HOT TUB TIME MACHINE. What is it that BTTF does so well that HTTM fails at? Well, first is the characters. In BACK TO THE FUTURE, Marty McFly spends the entire first act being dumped on. His band is rejected from playing prom. His dad is a wimp. The family car gets totalled which means he can't take his girlfriend out on a trip that weekend. Notice a theme here: it isn't just that things are going badly, but that things are going badly that he can't control. He auditions, but is rejected. He tries to get his dad to stand up to the local bully, but his dad refuses. He wants to take his gf out, but the car is totalled. This isn't just about sympathy, this is about the life of a teen where there is so much you want to do, but so often feel like you don't get a chance because of things outside your control (like your parents saying no.) Even his going back in time was beyond his control. He is visiting the professor when they are attacked and he is trying to escape. Things spiral out of control back in time as well, as he screws up the past trying to save his father from a car and now everything is beginning to unravel, including his very existance. Now he must act to save himself by helping his father, and it is by helping his father in the past that he will affect (positively) the present. Pretty cool, right?

Now let's talk about HOT TUB TIME MACHINE. Here you have four guys whose lives suck. Dumped by girlfriend one of them pines for the high school girlfriend he dumped (the one who got away), another has a wife who is cheating on him but he won't leave, there's a geeky computer nerd nephew living in basement who doesn't know who his father is, and a fourth guy who is suicidal for some reason I don't remember. Because their friend is suicidal, they take him up to ski country for a weekend of partying in the place where they had this wild weekend and they go back in time, yada yada yada. Now right away there's some clear differences. While BTTF exploits that very nature of teen-ness of the lack of control, HTTM doesn't really exploit anything. They are just four guys who are in the dumps. So they accidently go back in time and...what? Of course, they try not to change things, then they do change things but so what? And that's one of the problems -- on that pure emotional level the movie just isn't doing anything. Now you can get away with that in a comedy if you have a lot of cool and a lot of big laugh funny (ala THE HANGOVER). But in THE HANGOVER they had some cool, crazy things happening -- like that lion and Mike Tyson. HTTM doesn't have anything like that. And it doesn't have those cool time travel moments like in BTTF when he realizes his dad as a teen is spying through his mom's window? And then the lines "Where are my pants?" "There, on my hope chest"? Or how people thought his name was Calvin Kline because it was on his underwear? BTTF had TONS of great little moments as well as big cool stuff -- like a time machine built into a Delorian and the sequence with the lightning storm to get him back to the present. There just aren't any cool moments like that in HTTM. The best is when one of the guys, a failed musician, plays a gig and rocks out a modern song for the audience (almost exactly like McFly does at the school prom in BTTF).

So in the end where BACK TO THE FUTURE really seems to deal with that teen situation of things out of your control, HOT TUB TIME MACHINE just doesn't deal with anything. That's why BACK TO THE FUTURE is a classic and HTTM is a rental.

MILLENIUM TRILOGY - Girl with Dragon Tatto, Girl Who Played with Fire, and Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (a review)

MILLENIUM TRILOGY:

Girl with the Dragon Tatto

Girl Who Played with Fire

Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

(a review)

*** RECOMMEND ***

This is a review of the three Swedish films that make up the Millenium Trilogy, based on the best selling books by Stieg Larsson. The movies are detective stories centered on Mikael Blomkvist, a reporter for the magazine Millenium, and a tough lesbian computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander I'll do a short description of each story, trying to keep it as spoiler free as possible (although obviously I will have to let a few things out) with a brief summary afterwards. NOTE: these were the Swedish versions with subtitles that I watched and the subtitles didn't always seem to fit so it's possible I have a few details off.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

The story: the first movie in the trilogy starts with Blomkvist losing a libel case against a corrupt Swedish industrialist and sentenced to jail. When he gets out, he is asked to investigate the 37-year old case of a girl who went missing. It is a classic detective case: the family lives on an island and the bridge to the mainland was closed. There was no way on or off the island, and yet the girl completely disappeared. The man who hires Blomkvist suspects a member of his own family, but does not know who. Meanwhile, the corrupt Swedish industrialist had hired a tough, leather wearing computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, to spy on Blomkvist. She has become fascinated by him and comes to help him with the case. Together they begin to crack open the case and reveal all the dark family secrets the family had kept hidden.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

The story: we start a year after the end of the first movie. Lisbeth Salander has been abroad, using her hacking skill to amass a large amount of money. Blomkvist has been trying to keep in touch with her, but she doesn't respond. At the Millenium, a young reporter has uncovered information about a human trafficking/prostitution ring that has ties to members of government. As he is investigating he is murdered and Lisbeth Salander is framed for it. It gets worse when her guardian, the man who raped her in the first movie, is also murdered. Blomkvist believes she is innocent and they both (seperately) will try to unravel the case, but to do it they will have to delve deeper and deeper into Salander's past.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST

The story: starting immediately at the end of the second movie. Lisbeth Salander has been apprehended by police, still accused of the murders. She is placed in the hospital while she recovers from her injuries and awaits trial. Meanwhile, Blomkvist tries to uncover why Lisbeth has been so mistreated, leading to a conspiracy within the government and leading deeper and deeper into Lisbeth's past.

****

First, these aren't your typical Agatha Christie-type movies. They are much darker, dealing with some pretty intense elements of sex and violence. That's made very clear early in the first movie when Lisbeth Salander, the fierce 17-year old computer hacker meets her new guardian who proceeds to rape her. See, these movies aren't just about solving cases, they are about the various abuses women suffer and how the very institutions that should be protecting them often deliver them to the people who will abuse them.

Larsson also doesn't seem that interested in the traditional detective story. Much like HANNIBAL was very different from SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, but the second and third films are very different from the first. In fact, while the first movie worked best as a buddy-detective movie, Salander and Blomkvist are almost never together in the second or third movies, as Larsson movies from a standard detective story-structure to something that will let him delve into the psyche of his most interesting character, Lisbeth Salander.

In fact, as detective stories, the movies didn't do much for me at all. The cases themselves were in parts okay, in others difficult to follow (which might be from bad translations or from my habit of multi-tasking), but at no time did I find the mystery of the missing girl of the first movie or the murders/conspiracy of the second and third movies to be particularly engrossing. So as pure detective movies, I'd probably pass.

What made the movie work for me was the character Lisbeth Salander. She was abused as a child, wrongly institutionalized and now then further abused. Now is a fiernce, intelligent, uncompromising force of nature in these movies. I don't think it's an accident that the first movie is named after her (well, the American name -- the original Swedish name is "Men who Hate Women") and that the second and third movie focus more and more on Lisbeth and her past. Some of this works and some doesn't. I thought the second movie was the weakest of the three. The framing and revealing of her past was a bit too much, making her the center of a decade-long conspiracy. The third movie continues this, but switches focus in the second half to a trial where Lisbeth has to face the psychiatrist who committed her as an adolecent and wants her to be committed again. It is a fascinating section, where we see how the system has been manipulated by men to silence her and to allow her abuse to continue. And it is Lisbeth's response -- not wild anger, but with intelligence and a fierce will -- that make the movie worth watching.

If you think of the movies as being great detective stories you might be disappointed, but if you see them as a chance to meet one of the most interesting female characters of the last few years, the movies are a pretty cool trip.

*** RECOMMEND ***

Last week's comic book convention...

Last weekend I went to the Wizard World Anaheim comic book convention. It was a pretty dumb weekend to have a comic book convention as there was a HUGE comic book convention in Chicago that same weekend. So there was no Marvel, no DC, no promos for Iron Man or Toy Story or any of the other big movies coming out. They did have one big draw...STAN LEE!

Stan "the Man" Lee

Creator of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Iron man and the Hulk!

I missed the discussion/Q&A where he was promoting his latest book so I could try to get into a signing. Unfortunately I didn't get in the signing either, but I did get this picture while he was doing his signing. He's about 89 and still active creating and meeting fans. Love ya, Stan!

Because of that other comic con, they got a bunch of celebrities to come and sell autographs. Some stars included: William Shatner (yes, Captain Kirk himself!), Kevin Sorbo (Hercules), Shannen Doherty and Holly Marie Combs (Charmed), Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar, and (the original 60's Batman tv series), Jewel Staite (Firefly/Serenity), Ed Asner (Mary Tyler Moore Show), Mickey Dolenz (The Monkeys), Gil Gerard and Erin Gray (original Buck Rogers series), Doug Jones (Hellboy, Silver Surfer), Christopher Knight (Brady Bunch), Jason Mewes (Clerks), Nichelle Nichols (the original Star Trek), Billy Dee Williams (the Lando Calrisian!), Verne Troyer (it's Mini-Me! And holy cow is he tiny!) and a lot more I didn't really know or care about.

Since they were trying to sell photos (which they would sign) they didn't want you taking random photos but I got a few and pulled a couple from the net:

Adam West (the original Batman)

Jewel Staite (Firefly, Serenity)

Jewel Staite

Doug Jones

Anya Monzikova

William Shatner (the original Captain Kirk, Star Trek)

Original Batman cast (Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar and ???)

Jason Mewes (Clerks, Feast)

Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrision, Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back)

Nichelle Nichols (the original Ohuru, Star Trek)

Verne Troyer (Mini-Me from Austin Powers)

Doug Jones (Hellboy, Silver Surfer) and Kathy Najimy (from Numb3rs, Wall-E)

Diane Franklin (Last American Virgin -- one of the coolest and most brutal teen comedies ever made...I'll have to do a full post about that movie soon)

And the Back to the Future Delorian!


There also were a few people in costumes. There was one really good Predator costume I thought I got, but apparently didn't. For some reason there were mainly Star Wars costumes, although there wasn't anything SW-related about the con. Here are a few and some superhero costumes. Nothing close to the wildness of SDCC in July, but a few:

kid Iron Man and Storm

Batman and little Batmen

Doctor Octopus

Black Cat and Batgirl

Batmobile (from original tv show)

Batgirl (sideways)

Supergirl costume

Car from movie Kick A**

(The Batmobile, Batgirl sideways, Supergirl, and the car in Kick A**)

Jedi Training

Ghostbusters

Droids, inc R2D2

C3P0 and R2D2

Boba Fett

Storm Trooper

And I did get some comic book things. Here are a couple sketches:

Emma Frost by Phil Jimenez

Ms Marvel by Mike Mayhew

Catwoman by Simon Bisley

Supergirl by Drew Johnson

That Ms Marvel sketch is by artist Mike Mayhew, best known for his fully painted artwork, which is just gorgeous. I also got some large prints he had that are fantastic. I wish he'd had more! Just beautiful!