watching movies one cup at a time

What can I say that hasn’t already been said in the flurry of excitement over this movie? The rave reviews are pouring in as this film rockets past all box office records. Does it really live up to all the crazy hype surrounding it? Yes, it absolutely does.

I expected this film to be good. The trailers were all very promising and even early on Heath Ledger’s Joker promised to be a fascinating character. But even my high expectations were far exceeded. Quite simply this movie has shattered the mold of superhero films and taken the genre to a level no one ever expected a comic book movie to go. It is a crowning moment and has raised the bar to a height I doubt many will be able to grasp. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a sort of Vampire Western. A young guy named Caleb runs into a pretty girl named Mae who just happens to be a vampire that runs with a posse of vamps from town to town killing people and lighting stuff o9n fire. Caleb gets sucked in (get it?) and tries to fit in with the homicidal crew but can’t stand the necessity to kill. Eventually he escapes and is “cured” by a blood transfusion before having the final showdown with the vamp posse and rescuing Mae in the process. Read the rest of this entry »

Since The Dark Knight opens today, they are playing a lot of the previous Batman movies on cable. Batman Forever was included and I’d forgotten how stupid it was. Way stupid. It’s the second worst Batman movie after the criminally terrible Batman & Robin. Val Kilmer is a terrible Bruce Wayne/Batman, just stiff as a board and looking bored the entire time. Nicole Kidman is a disposable vamp who is just filling in the cliche, must-have love interest role. Tommy Lee Jones is over-the-top in a bad way and just annoying, a total waste of his talents. And Jim Carrey… holy crap he needs to be shot! Over-the-top doesn’t even cover it. He blew the top off, ate it, vomitted it up, and blew it off again. And it’s all 100% stupid.

John Carpenter’s attempt at political commentary is pretty ham-fisted. Not going for subtlety, he creates a world where everything is going to hell fast and weird skinless aliens are the cause. And they just happen to be brainwashing all of us through sublimal messages behind everything. Messages like “Obey” “Submit” and “Marry and procreate.” And with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in the lead role, you know this is going to be more like Die Hard than All The President’s Men. For what it is, it’s not bad. It does provide a way to criticize Ronald Reagan’s Yuppie Utopia of the ’80s and feed into a million conspiracy theories about how this government is controlling us. Aliens? More like the ruling class. I think it’s a little optimistic to pin this on aliens and not the evil nature of men. They don’t need an alien to dupe them into manipulating the masses. But it’s a simple, kinda fun movie. And since we are being manipulated anyway, anyone drawing attention to it is a good thing.

Creepy. What’s up with David Cronenberg? He’s like obsessed with creepy flesh movies where people are puling themselves apart. Videodrome is a tv show that sends out a signal that makes you hallucinate and then lets people control you. James Woods plays a small-time TV network buyer always on the look out for “cutting edge” programs. He comes across videodrome and gets sucked into a world of S&M, sex, violence, and twisted hallucinations. Debbie Harry plays a sort of muse to the videodrome and you never really know if she is real or a hallucination in Wood’s mind. They get freaky, video tapes turn into breathing flesh, tvs come alive and get sexually turned on, and the line between video and reality disappears. It’s got lots of violence, weird sexual images and Debbie Harry looking hot. Not bad. Read the rest of this entry »

As bad as you think it is?  It’s worse.

Tina Fey is awesome. She may not be the best actress in the universe but what she is capable of, she does extremely well. Baby Mama is the story of Fey’s character, Kate, who decides that after years of being a career-centered woman she now wants to make room for a family. Unfortunately she finds many road blocks in making that happen and decides to go the surrogate route. Amy Poehler becomes the surrogate and eventually winds up living with Kate. From there we get a lot of “The Odd Couple” type of jokes but it never gets stupid or overly-cliche. And eventually both characters make changes for the better. Read the rest of this entry »

This movie is basically an updated, teen version of Hitchcock’s classic “Rear Window.” A person confined to their home spies on the neighbors and suspects one of them is a killer. Disturbia is not a classic but it is an entertaining film that is well done. Kind of like “Rear Window” mixed with Tom Hank’s “The ‘burbs” and “Fright Night.” Read the rest of this entry »

I feel like the knives were out for M. Night Shyamalan this time around. No matter what movie he did, I get the impression the critics were going to rip him and people just weren’t going to get behind it. I think it’s a common phenomenon where an artist peaks on their first project and then spends the rest of their career trying to best that initial success. And it really does seem like each of his films has gotten weaker and weaker. Now I didn’t hate his last film, The Lady In The Water, like so many other people did. But it wasn’t great. And now we have The Happening and again pressure is put on M. Night Shyamalan to “win back” his audience and live up to the burden of his potential that was put on him after The Sixth Sense.

But unfortunately The Happening isn’t the one that’s going to do that. The story is interesting but it’s paper-thin. There is just not much to grab on to here and the characters spend most of the time running from the wind. Yes, the wind. Sound scary? “It’s getting windy!!! HOLY CRAP!!!” is not really the spine-chilling scream we usually hear in movies like this. But yea, it’s the wind. Ya see, the plants are revolting against the evil, polluting humans and are releasing a chemical toxin into the air that basically reverses a person’s self-preservation instinct. So as a result they immediately kill themselves. I didn’t think about it before I saw the movie, but once I was watching it I realized I was watching over an hour of people committing suicide. Sound like a good time? Not really. It was kind of a big bummer actually. Especially when they throw in kids and parents and all that sentimental stuff that is only there to make you feel terrible. Read the rest of this entry »

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are a couple staying in a remote house one night after a disappointing evening at a wedding. Three strangers show up and start to terrorize the couple while wearing some goofy masks. Terror ensues. This movie is pretty much a one-note suspense flick where every 5 minutes someone jumps out or creeps up and goes “boo!”  Overall it was rather predictable and boring.