Posts Tagged ‘review’

I’m Not There, the acclaimed drama that stars Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin all as Bob Dylan, arrives on DVD this Tuesday. Considering that Franklin is a young black kid, Gere plays a version of Billy the Kid and Blanchett is female, one can only imagine that the movie is not exactly a literal biopic, and in fact is one of the most unique and complicated movies I’ve ever seen.

Director Todd Haynes, amazingly, was not nominated for an Oscar for his masterful work here, and, almost equally shocking was the fact that Cate Blanchett, who turns in the best performance of her career, didn’t win for Best Supporting Actress.

You can read my full I’m Not There movie review here.

Regardless, for all of you who didn’t see I’m Not There in theaters, the Bob Dylan movie is now available on DVD. Here is my I’m Not There DVD review:

The DVD review is for the two-disc collector’s edition, a surprisingly weighty release for a movie such as this. The environmental side of me questions why this release is on two discs other than to market it as such; there are tons of special features, but quantity over quality is the name of the game.

The first disc contains I’m Not There along with a director’s commentary from Todd Haynes, along with some on-screen tie-ins to the songs.

The second disc is where the meat is, and contains such features as:

• Deleted scenes
• Alternate/extended scenes
• Outtakes
• Auditions
• A Conversation with Todd Haynes
• Making the Soundtrack
• The Red Carpet Premiere

The deleted scenes are what you’d expect, nothing too substantial or memorable. With this type of film, where the story is essentially organized chaos, it’s hard to watch a single scene and appreciate it on its own. The outtakes are humorous but nothing spectacular. The auditions are interesting; it’s always nice to see actors in raw format and how they went about landing the part. “A Conversation with Todd Haynes” is pretty good, and basically is about the co-writer/director talking about how the movie formed in his mind – and how he made sense of it all. At times, it sounds like he didn’t even know what he was doing. The “Making the Soundtrack” featurette is also pretty interesting and offers up some good Dylan songs for a second listening.

Included on the second disc is also a “Tribute to Heath Ledger,” though it looks like it was put together at the last minute.

Ultimately, the I’m Not There Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD has some decent features, though of the ones they list on the back of the box, only a couple are really noteworthy. Still, this is the kind of the movie that, due to its complexity, requires some further explanation, and there is just enough here to satisfy that requirement.

The DVD set is good, but not great. However, the movie itself makes up for any deficiencies on the DVD.

I just got back from Iron Man (a 10:15 Thursday showing), and it was pretty cool. Here’s my full Iron Man movie review. And, I can easily say, Iron Man is the best movie of the 2008 summer season. Yes, I know it’s 1am on May 2nd and no other summer movie has reached theaters yet… but I’m not lying!

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull arrives in theaters shortly, which means that Lucasfilm and Paramount are back at it releasing everything Indy in anticipation. With re-release DVDs of the original three Indiana Jones movies coming soon, April 29th brings The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume Three: The Years of Change to DVD in a massive box set in vein with Volume One and Volume Two.

Like the previous two box sets, Volume 3 is packed with special features, movies and so on and so forth. George Lucas and the crew spared no expense making these box sets, even going as far as to re-edit the original television show, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, into feature-length films. Whether that’s a good thing, maybe not.

This final box set comes with 10 discs, seven Indiana Jones movies and, according to the box, over 15 hours of special features and over two dozen documentaries. Needless to say, I don’t have the time and willpower to watch everything before writing this review.

A fan of the show growing up, I always enjoyed the the stories involving teenage Indy (played by Sean Patrick Flannery) a lot more, for obvious reasons. The stories are more adventure-filled, a lot less sappy and generally more interesting. While the original TV show mixed together the stories of super-young Indy and teenage Indy on, generally, an episode-by-episode basis and earmarked those episodes to shots of a really old Indiana Jones, these box sets have recut the episodes, made them more chronological and removed the old Indy altogether. The result is several feature-length movies that, while able to focus a lot more on a specific plot line, aren’t nearly as cohesive as they should be.

To make hour-and-a-half-long movies, Lucas had to splice and dice two or three stories together to make one, and the result is often a meandering one. Take Tales of Innocence, for example (coincidentally the first movie I watched on this box set). The first half is about Indy trying to identify a traitor in his crew during World War I and his ultimately tragic love affair with a local woman. It’s pretty exciting and entertaining, aside from a few slow minutes. Then, suddenly, the story switches gear and Indy and several new characters travel to investigate the disappearance of a group of soldiers, only to find that one of the missing commanders has somehow turned into Lord Dracula. This story is fine, too – and also plays into the mystical element that is found in all of the theatrical releases more so than most of the World War I plots – but is clearly not a part of the same movie.

To save time, money and effort, and to appease fans, I would have just left the episodes as they originally were, but we’re stuck with these feature-length re-edits which are good enough. A lot of people had probably forgot that there were dozens of additional hours of Indiana Jones goodness available, and it’s nice to see this high quality show get some renewed attention.

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume III: The Years of Change is available to own on April 29th. Did I already say that?

I just received the Lars and the Real Girl DVD today in the mail. I got home from work at 5:30, went to my chiropractor’s from 6 to 7, watched the Seattle Mariners finally win a game (what is going on with their bullpen/offense?) and then squeezed in a trip to Costco. Got back at 8:40 with intentions of writing a bit on my new novel (I’m on chapter 2), and debated about watching the special features for Lars and the Real Girl before starting. It could eat up an hour of my time, I thought, but maybe I should pop in the DVD just to check things out…

First off, Lars and the Real Girl is a great movie. Seriously, it’s one of the best movies of 2007. Ryan Gosling is great, and the story is tragically uplifting and heartwarming without ever being sappy. It’ll make you laugh and even cry (well, if you’re into crying at movies, which I’m not), but more so it will just make you laugh. It’s also a lighthearted romantic drama, and works on that level as well. You can read my full Lars and the Real Girl movie review here.

However, the Lars and the Real Girl DVD sucks. My concern about wasting too much time watching the special features was not worth it, as the two movie trailers included on the DVD plus the time it is taking to write this DVD review more than account for the total number of minutes you should spend watching the special features.

The DVD includes a deleted scene that – I’m pretty sure – is only 1.3 seconds long. Wowzer, too bad that got cut!

There’s a small, 10-minute featurette about the movie, of which I only watched half of because I realized just how dull, uninformative and promotional it was.

There’s also a six-minute segment about the “real girl” in the movie (i.e. the sex doll) that is mildly amusing, as Gosling, in an interview, gets upset with her, tears off his mike and storms off, leaving the “real girl” to fend for herself. Still, is it really worth watching? No.

And that’s about it. 16 minutes of special features, only 0.76 minutes of which are worth your time. Lars and the Real Girl is a great movie, but if you’re into special features, the DVD is a waste of whatever material DVDs are made of.

Poor Mena Suvari. The actress, fairly attractive and a decent actress, started off her career about as good as anyone who isn’t named Jennifer Hudson can do: not only did she have a major part in one of the last great teen classics, American Pie, but she was the title character in one of the best movies of all time, American Beauty. She was 20 at the time both of those movies were released, and if that’s how her career begun, just imagine what she’d be doing in eight years.

The direct-to-DVD remake of George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead. Wow.

The movie really isn’t a remake of the Romero original, as it bears little resemblance to that film. The original was a continuation of Romero’s two classics and featured a bunch of characters tucked away in an underground bunker. This new Day of the Dead is your standard zombie flick; what starts off looking like an epidemic of the flu turns out to be a cannibalistic nightmare. Several unsuspecting characters find themselves at the center of a shit storm, and you know the rest. Why this movie is actually allowed to be marketed as “based on the motion picture from George A. Romero” is a bit astounding. Other than being a zombie movie, the two movies are far removed.

As one might expect from a direct-to-DVD release, the movie isn’t anything you should rush out to buy, rent or see. This is no theatrical Dawn of the Dead remake, let me tell you. Hell, it’s not even Land of the Dead. It’s your run-of-the-mill zombie film, with so-so writing, quasi-cheap special effects and so on and so forth.

That being said, it is a step above other direct-to-DVD releases, and I have to wonder if with a little more budget and a little more attention to detail this movie could have gone to theaters. It was clearly made with the intention to go straight to DVD, as the makeup, film quality and script aren’t good enough to take the film to the next level. Still, if you like zombie movies, Day of the Dead is tolerable. It has a lot of action, a fair amount of gore and, for the type of movie it is, surprisingly decent acting.

Suvari holds her own and the rest of the cast do what they’re supposed to. Nick Cannon isn’t particularly good, though he was clearly written with the badass token black guy in mind. Ving Rhames even is in the movie, obviously homage to the Dawn of the Dead remake.

The movie suffers from some unnecessary visual effects; I’m not a big fan of zombies being able to jump long distances through the air, climb on ceilings and so on and so forth. The zombies also sound like dinosaurs, another unnecessary move. Ultimately, Steve Miner, who has directed such quality B-grade films as Halloween H20 and Lake Placid, was given a low budget and tasked with making a direct-to-DVD feature. There is nothing here to suggest otherwise.

Sadly, I just looked on IMDB I see that the budget for the movie is $18 million. That’s not a lot these days, but considering that Shaun of the Dead was made for only $4 million, it actually is surprising that the movie looks a lot better. The decision to go with special effects over quality makeup was clearly a bad one.

The new Dawn of the Dead isn’t as bad as I was expecting, and in fact is moderately entertaining, but a few major but doable tweaks could have gone a long way. Fans of the original will be disappointed.

The Aristocats arrived on DVD in February. I was supposed to review it in February. I didn’t. It’s now March, and I finally got to the film. As much as I could watch anyway.

I don’t believe that, even in my childhood, I ever saw The Aristocats, and as such, my childhood sentiment for the film isn’t there. The movie, about four cats who try to make it back home to Paris after they are abandoned in the countryside by an evil butler, is a Disney classic, but it’s certainly a film that shows its age.

The Aristocats is moderately funny at times and has some quality entertainment; a scene where the butler hides in a haystack and carefully tries to steal a bunch of stuff from a couple of dogs is pretty amusing, and there are other highlights as well. The animation is good given that the film originally hit theaters 38 years ago (yes, 1970 was 38 years ago); actually, I miss this style of animation a lot. All the cartoons these days look so glossy; the roughness of The Aristocats really works in its favor.

I expect little kids will still find this movie entertaining, but I’d be curious to see if that’s the truth. The style of humor is certainly different than that found in modern movies, and I wonder if children are still able to appreciate calmer, more laid back cartoons like this film. Unlike most cartoons, The Aristocats really doesn’t have a prominent villain, and the film takes its time moving from sequence to sequence without any sense of excitement or tension. This isn’t bad – it’s just different.

Nevertheless, I found The Aristocats a little boring. Had I grown up on the film, I’d probably think differently, but since I didn’t, I didn’t see anything very spectacular here.  Little kids may still enjoy it, but the film certainly feels dated.

The DVD offers several games and activities, deleted scenes and some behind-the-scenes featurettes, none of which I bothered to watch.

I just watched Jumper early this afternoon, despite it being a fabulous day outside. Relatively warm with few clouds in the sky, it was a great day to play in the park, go for a jog, or at least watch beautiful women jogging. Instead, I opted to go and sit with my male roommate in a dark theater and watch Hayden Christensen jump around the globe while being pursued by Samuel L. Jackson.

The movie is okay. From an action and sci-fi perspective, it’s worth it. Jumper is consistently entertaining and has a great concept to build from; unfortunately, director Doug Liman and the screenwriters involved don’t take full advantage of the film’s potential, leaving several plot holes in its wake. If you can get over these, you’ll like Jumper, but if not… well, here’s hoping for a remake of sorts a few years down the line.

You can read my full Jumper movie review here.

I just watched The Bucket List, nearly two months after it was originally released in theaters. The Jack Nicholson/Morgan Freeman death comedy didn’t get very good reviews – only 42% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes – and as such as I had relegated to this to the rental pile. However, on a cold Saturday night, one of my friends and I visited the movie theater… and found that The Bucket List was actually pretty good.

The movie is funny and at times emotional. It’s not unique, and it’s not groundbreaking or award-winning, but its humor is genuine and heartwarming. It’s fun watching Nicholson and Freeman play off one another, and they really have great chemistry.

Read my full Bucket List movie review.

Why do I subject myself to watching movies like this? Lake Placid 2: Unrated, a direct-to-DVD horror movie release, was just asking to be bad, and guess what? It is bad. Really bad.

I have to admit that I sort of liked the original Lake Placid, starring Bill Pullman. It was cheesy and not the least bit realistic, but it was a funny little horror movie with a big crocodile. That doesn’t mean I wanted to see a sequel. This movie, starring John Schneider (“Smallville”) and several unrecognizable actors, is once again set at Lake Placid, making you wonder why anyone would go near the water ever again. Two groups find themselves stranded in the wilderness with a giant crocodile (or several giant crocodiles?), one a sheriff, his hot deputy and a few other pieces of fodder, the other the sheriff’s son, his love interest and some more pieces of fodder. As they get picked off one by one by the cheesy-looking monster, one questions whether the budget of the film was a million… pesos.

Lake Placid 2 is entertaining enough, I’ll admit, but has absolutely nothing worthwhile about it. The crocodiles were made on the cheap, and the special effects department clearly had very little to work with. The crocs are about as scary as a little girl in her church outfit, and regardless of the special effects, director David Flores does so little to make his movie exciting, it’s pretty pathetic. With exception to the cliche underwater sequence that every monster movie must have, the audience, and the characters, see and hear the crocodiles coming from a mile away, which removes any tension the film might have been able to muster. The creators of the movie clearly have never seen a crocodile in real life; otherwise, they could have made something a little better than this piece of crap.

The only highlights of Lake Placid 2 are a few shots of nude women, some ridiculously cheesy-looking blood and… well, that’s about it. At least my mother, who loves bad monster movies, will be happy to receive a new DVD for her collection.

Just so everyone knows, I updated my Top Ten Movies of 2007 List. I forgot to put Once on the list, and if you’ve seen Once, you know that’s a movie that deserves to be recognized. The movie, about a street musician and an immigrant who strike up a relationship to work on producing an album of the musician’s work, is incredibly simple yet absolutely intriguing at the same time. The song, nominated for an Oscar, is one of the greatest songs to grace the silver screen in a long time.

Read my Once movie review, or take a look at my updated Best Movies of 2007 list.

The anticipation is over, and the J.J. Abrams-produced movie Cloverfield is now in theaters. After one of the most impressive marketing campaigns ever performed by a major motion picture studio, expectations were high, the buzz extraordinarily high. Cloverfield was pretty much asking to be a disappointment, but it is not to be.

Cloverfield pretty much kicks ass. The movie is fun, exciting and action-packed, which is more than anyone can ask for. I’ve written a full Cloverfield movie review here.

Up until now, I’ve stayed quiet on the Golden Globes. Yes, the reason is partially that I’ve been too busy to do a blog post, but after the winners were announced in a press conference earlier in the week, I had to chime in. How in God’s name did Sweeney Todd win Best Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes?

Sweeney Todd, directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp, is a f**k up in more ways than one. The production values are pretty good, but the movie is boring and features some of the worst music to ever grace musicals. The songs are literally brain numbing, and when sung by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter (who was somehow nominated for Best Actress for her role) and several other actors who just weren’t made for musicals, the film just sucked. Two of my buddies spent most of the time laughing at how bad it was, and even my brother, who I thought might like the film, didn’t find much to be entertained by. My movie review is less than friendly.

All four of the other movies nominated in the category are so much better. Hairspray isn’t anything spectacular, but Charlie Wilson’s War and Across the Universe are both a step above much of the landscape. Juno is simply terrific, and a legitimate (albeit unlikely) contender for Oscar Gold.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the Golden Globes. I never understood the point of them. They’re like the Oscars, only not as prestigious and not as meaningful, and they often have a few off-the-wall surprises like Sweeney Todd that just plain out suck. It’s hard to take the Golden Globes too seriously, and they’re pretty much like Spring Training to the MLB or Pre-Season for the NFL. In other words, they’re meaningless.

While I’m on my rant about the Golden Globes, I’ve always hated the Best Musical or Comedy category. I do realize that comedies often get screwed when it comes to year-end awards (though since Shakespeare in Love, not nearly so much), but the Best Musical or Comedy category often serves as a means to provide non-deserving films a chance at an award (come on, did anyone really think that Dreamgirls was that good of a movie?). Thinking of Dreamgirls, the category tends to favor dramas that happen to have music in them. As Chicago proved, musicals can compete with dramas in the main event, so why should musical dramas (Walk the Line, Ray, Dreamgirls and so on and so forth) get placed in a separate category, which only serves to neglect the real point of the category: to benefit comedies.

And furthermore, do you realize that the Golden Globes nominated 12 movies for best picture this year? 12 movies! For some reason, they nominated seven movies for Best Drama, and another five for Best Musical or Comedy. That means that twelve different movies get to market that they were nominated for Best Picture at the Golden Globes. What bullsh*t.

At least Atonement and Daniel Day-Lewis won for Best Drama and Best Actor respectively.

It’s been a year of great comedies (Knocked Up, Superbad, Hot Fuzz), and 2007 ended with a bang in the form of Juno (2007). Juno, about a 16-year old girl who gets knocked up by one of her friends and decides to keep the baby to term and then give it to a seemingly perfect couple (who of course is anything but), is a funny film with sharp and witty dialogue and great performances from almost everyone involved, namely Ellen Page – who has a shot at winning an Oscar for her performance.

Normally, comedic roles don’t fare too well for women when it comes to Oscar wins, but while 2007 was a great year for movies, it really wasn’t a good year for leading ladies. When you think back on all the quality films of 2007, very few of those movies starred women that could be considered (even by the Oscar’s loose rules) leading actresses, and even fewer offered the kind of performances worthy of awards.

Enter Ellen Page, who handles the rather “complicated” script from Diablo Cody (isn’t that an awesome name) with ease and makes Juno her own. Ellen Page has a solid chance at winning, though her age and inexperience may work against her.

What do you think?

You can read my full Juno movie review here.

Zodiac, one of the best movies of 2007, is the latest David Fincher masterpiece, a serial killer film completely unlike Se7en it’s completely inappropriate to compare the two. Zodiac is over two and a half hours long, and yet it is suspenseful and intriguing from beginning to end. Wonderfully directed and edited, the movie flows with a casual intenseness that never eases, even after the killer stops killing.

You can read my full Zodiac movie review here.

However, Paramount has now released (as of January 8, 2008) a two-disc Director’s Cut version of the film. The good thing is that Paramount didn’t mark up the DVD cover with stupid marketing tricks like “The version you couldn’t see in theaters!” or “Unrated” (it has, in fact, the exact same R-rating that the theatrical release had); the bad thing is that if this is David Fincher’s actual director cut, he must have been pretty happy with the theatrical release. This new DVD version adds a thrilling four minutes into the film; where those four minutes are placed I have no clue. I hadn’t watched the movie since its release in March 2007, and if there was a defined scene that was inserted in, I didn’t notice it.

Basically, if you already own the theatrical version on DVD, there is absolutely no reason to buy this one for the film… However, the DVD does offer a fair amount of special features that I am pretty sure are new to this edition (though don’t take my word for it). I spent most of my time on the Director’s Cut (no, there’s no alternate ending), but the special features include two separate audio commentaries, a long behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Zodiac, a split-screen comparison that takes a look at the difference between the animatics and finished film for the murder sequences, a feature-length documentary that examines the actual investigation and includes interviews with the original investigators and victims, and another featurette about the prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen.

So, I recant my previous statement. If you’re not into special features, don’t bother, but this Zodiac package is pretty packed with material; I’ll definitely be exploring the rest of these DVD features over the next few days.

I recently got my hands on Rush Hour 3, a movie I normally would have seen in theaters had it not looked a bit dull at the time. A relatively big fan of the first two Rush Hour movies, I’ve found the franchise to be entertaining, even though I have been thoroughly frustrated with the watered down action for Jackie Chan in his American releases.

Rush Hour was fun. While I was never a big Chris Tucker fan, the pairing of Tucker and Chan is a surprisingly good one, even if Tucker acts and sounds like a complete idiot. The action in this one isn’t great, but the movie is fun and certainly worthy of a sequel.

Rush Hour 2 flipped the scenario and landed Tucker in China, which is a bigger fish-out-of-water story than in the first movie (Chan in the United States). There are a lot of good gags in this one, and the action is a bit better. The presence of beautiful Zhang Ziyi also put this one a notch above the first Rush Hour.

Rush Hour 3 is exactly like the second two, only this time the two characters are both out of their element in France. There’s nothing remotely unique about this movie, and everything, from the character relationships to the action to the comedy to acting, seems less interesting. While not a disaster by any means, it just doesn’t have the spark it needed.

You can read my full Rush Hour 3 movie review here.