Review : Watchmen

6 / 10

Review : Burn After Reading

I've been pretty remiss in doing movie reviews for the last copule months so I'm going back through some of the one's I've missed.

I was pretty hesitant seeing this after the fiasco of a movie that was the last Cohen brothers offering but hey everyone deserves a second chance right? Especially a second chance with a cast like this. Well they almost lost me with this one, I wanted to not like it. There's quite a few things going on, different plot lines, but the reality is, this is movie about how fucked up people are. Regardless of their station in life, or their circumstances. People are not only fucked up, but they bring it on themselves.

Now, however true that maybe, it's not exactly a recipe for a great movie. Frankly it makes for a stupendously grating movie, no matter how much humor you try to shoehorn into it, it's a movie about idiots. I found myself rather unsympathetic to, well, everyone in the movie. Except maybe for Malkovitch, but his ex CIA agent Osbourne Cox is pretty unlikable anyway. It's a whole movie of anti-heroes.

J.K. Simmons and David Rasche, however, were the saving grace of this movie as sort of the Deux ex Machina of the film, watching the idiocy unfold from afar. They don't have a lot of screen time, but, man, those two were the best part of the movie. Not only that, the way they look at the goings on, helps you look at it in a way that you can appreciate the humor in the situation. J.K. Simmons in particular is brilliant. If you missed it in the theatre, and judging from the box office, you probably did, you should still give this one a try at home.




Five out of Ten

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

I hadn't heard anything about this movie until it won a bunch of Golden Globe awards. I honestly didn't know even what it was about when we went to see it. As it turns out, it's a sometimes funny, sometimes gritty, always engaging story about a kid from the slums of Mumbai. Directory Danny boyle (Trainspotting) took a good story, and made it a great movie by simply telling it in an interesting way. To avoid spoilers for those of you who haven't seen it yet, I'll just say that it can't be more highly recommended. I give it






A) 2/10
B) 4/10
C) 6/10
D) 9/10

I'll go with D, nine out of ten, final answer.

Review: Body of Lies

As much as I hate to say it, I think DiCaprio has turned into one of the better actors in Hollywood today. He stars with Russel Crowe in this political action flick based on Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’ 2007 novel about a CIA operative who's working official cover in the middle east. Ridley Scott is one of my favorite directors and he delivers again here, deftly managing a complex plot. Crowe and DiCaprio both give excellent performences. Quite unlike a Bond movie, it's a very gritty look into what I imagine the world of "spies" is actually like. My problem with this film is that the story is a little flat. While somewhat interesting, it certainly isn't new and considering the subject matter, not nearly as compelling as it could have been. A good movie for the most part, but, come on, it couldn't even beat a Talking Animal Movie at the box office it's opening week, so I imagine that most people will see it from their couch. Worth watching.


Six out of Ten

Review: Babylon AD

I'm a sucker for Action/Sci-Fi, and I wouldn't say that I'm a Vin Diesel fan, but he can be all right in the right movie. This is not that movie. I honestly don't know how this movie even got to the point where they put images on film. The story is dumb. I could go on and on about all the things that are wrong with this movie, but I'm going to sum it up in two words. Don't fucking bother.


Three out of Ten.

Review: Taken

I've been seeing the trailers for this for a while and it seemed like a pretty decent action flick, but Liam Neeson, as an ass-kicking ex-spy? I wasn't quite sure I was going to buy that one. It turns out that he's pretty good, and a pretty good fit for the role. A role that included some serious ass-kicking. Neeson was pretty good as the ex-agent, ex-husband, ex-father.

This is what a spy movie should be like, And Neeson what what a spy on a mission should be. No questions, no prisoners. People that don't get shot in regular spy movies? In this movie, they get shot. The whole thing is pretty visceral. Unfortunately, it's also the problem with this movie. The premise is simple, but effective. The action is great. The dialogue? Horrendous. The director knows how to direct an action sequence, but either doesn't recognize bad acting, can't be bothered to ask his actors to act well, doesn't know how or just doesn't care. We're talking groan worthy dialogue, just awful.

This one hasn't had too much success at the box office, but I really liked it. I can forgive the bad dialogue and acting since the action was great. You might not want to spend $11.00 to see it in the theater if you're not a big action buff, but it's a definite rental. One that I give


Seven Stars

Review: Wall-E

It must get boring for the guys at Pixar, everything they do is awesome. Not only that, but they really are getting better and better and better at making movies. Wall-E is not only the best movie that Pixar has ever made, it's the best movie that I've seen this year, and it's quite possibly one of the best movies I have seen, ever. There's not a single negative thing I have to say about this movie. It doesn't make for much of a review. Awesome this. Beautiful that. Kids liked it. Funny. Timely. Blah, blah, blah. Go see it so Pixar makes some more money, so they keep making movies like this one.




Ten Stars

Review: Hellboy 2 - The Golden Army

Mrs. STFU and I saw, this, hmmmmm, maybe three weeks ago? I really liked the first one. This one, meh. It felt like Del Toro was trying to hard to take everything to the next level. Part of the reason I liked the first one was that, even though it was out there, you could kind of buy it. It was almost believeable. The sequel was just off the hook, over the top, like, out there man. Too much character pseudo-development, too fantastical a story. It was all just a little bit forced. The effects were competent, and the action was decent, it's just not as good as the first one. The reviewers on rottentomatoes.com love it, which just goes to show you that movie critics are idiots.



Five out of Ten

Review : The Dark Knight

Just saw this in my drafts for this blog. Got as far as putting the picture and links in and then promptly forgot about it. It's been a while since I've seen it at this point. Sure it made a bazillion dollars at the box, sure it's good, but was it that good? I don't think that it was. It was certainly too long. I think Robert Downey Jr said it best when he said.

"didn't get it. ... [I] still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character." He said that while watching the movie, it dawned on him, "I get it. This is so high-brow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie." He then added, "You know what? Fuck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."

Which is, maybe, a little harsh, but Downey is a Marvel whore now, so what do you expect, but this sequel wasn't any better than Batman Begins. Don't get me wrong. It's a great movie, and you should see it. It's just not all that, as the kids say now-a-days. It's about twenty minutes too long and parts of it feel a little forced, bit it's still pretty good. Good enough to earn


8/10

Review: Wanted

Here's everything you need to know about this movie in three easy steps

1. Physics ... who needs it?

2. Long on action, short on story.

3. Angelina Jolie is ridiculously hot.


Like Tropic Thunder, I'm torn between a three and a four for this movie. I was entertained, certainly, but it could've been so much better. I going to take that as I sign that I should be rating on a scale of ten, instead of five and give Wanted


6/10

Review : Tropic Thunder

Checkout at the hotel in LA was at noon, and our flight was at 8:30 so some of had some time to kill Saturday. There was a theater across the street from the hotel, so Nick, Keith, Simon and I walked over to check out a matinee showing of Tropic Thunder to help wile away the afternoon.

I've seen a lot of movies. I've been in a lot of movie theaters. I've seen movies at Mann's Chinese and the Arclight. I've seen world premieres at the Hollywood Bowl. I've been to drive-ins. I've seen movies on big screens. I've seen movies on small screens. I have never, never, in my life been in a movie theater as awful as the one that we saw this movie in. Simon and I were going to get popcorn until Keith pointed out the, sadly full, glue roach traps just out of sight around a corner in the lobby. I was wearing sandals and I really didn't want to put my feet on the floor while we were watching the movie. The carpet was dirty. The seats were threadbare. Bad screen, bad sound. It was just terrible.

Which is too bad, because Tropic Thunder is really, really funny. It does a pretty good job of taking the piss out of Hollywood in general, an actors in particular. Robert Downey is brilliant as the melanin-challenged Australian, but Tom Cruise is just as good as the studio exec. The two of them are almost good enough to make me forget that I hate Ben Stiller. Worth seeing. I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and round up to


Four Stars.

Quickie Movie Reviews

All the new Qantas flights from Auckland to LAX have on demand movies. In no particular order, I can remember watching ...

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Neil Patrick Harris reprising his role as himself? Classic. Some flat spots, but overall pretty god damn funny. George Bush as lovable pot head. Awesome.

Three Stars

Jason Statham, the most underrated action hero in Hollywood today in a supposedly true story of Royal intrigue and West End thuggery in Early Seventies London. Pretty good. It's no "Snatch", but worth a rental.

Three Stars





Crap. Put me right to sleep. You know you've fucked up when you can make George Clooney look bad. No Country for Old Men might not be the Cohen's worst movie after all. Fuck that, yes it is.

Two Stars

I've read the book that this was based on so I was looking forward to this one. Spacey is excellent. Good Movie

Four Stars








I think that I'm forgetting one but it's all a bit of a blur.

Review : Hancock

Another Fourth of July, another Will Smith movie. Can someone tell me exactly how the Fresh Price got to be the biggest, baddest, most bakable movie star in the universe? Let's see ... Independance Day, Men in Black, Wild Wild West, I Robot, Hitch, Pursuit of Happyness and I am Legend. That's what, a couple billion dollars box office? Some of those are actually really good movies and Smith is actually really, really good in a couple of those movies.  Can he continue his summer movie domination with Hancock? Does the pope wear a funny hat?  The critics hate this movie, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why I like it.   I think the only thing it proves is that critics are idiots.  Mrs. STFU did like it as well, which means that you'll probably like it.  Smith is great as the anti-hero Hancock. That's about all I can say without getting into spoiler territory.  It's a good movie, it not the usual Will Smith summer blockbuster, but I liked it enough to give it





Four Stars

Review : Kung Fu Panda

I'm a little behind on the movie reviews. AM has been talking about seeing this movie for, oh, I don't know, like, a year. It finally came out, and off we went. it's Dreamworks' first real animated offering that wasn't a Shrek movie since, hmmmm, Over the Hedge? It's been a while, anyway. The only preconceived notion that I had going in to this movie was that I was pretty sure that I was going to annoyed by Jack Black, as the voice of the Panda. I was, thankfully, not. Yeah, you could tell that it was Jack Black, but he at least attempted to play a character. Quite unlike Shifu, who was played so brilliantly that when the credits rolled, I was utterly astonished to find that he was voiced by Dustin Hoffman.

I flat out loved this movie. I loved the look, and the art direction. The plot was offbeat, but still engaging enough that at the end, when it all came around full circle, I wasn't sitting there thinking "yeah, I got that thirty minutes ago, thanks". I was genuinely caught off guard. Maybe because I'm slow, maybe I was just too busy being entertained, hard to say. The escape of Tai Lung is probably the most awesome action sequence I have seen in a film, live action included, in a long time. I usually don't like it when all of the voices are played by "name" actors, who, in general, couldn't voice act their way out of a paper bag. And although most of the voice actors for Kung Fu Panda were A-List types, it didn't bother me as much as I would have thought.

This movie was funny because it was a funny movie, not because it was a movie that had funny people in it. It was hugely entertaining. Good fun, enjoyed by the entire gang and can only be given


Five Stars

Review : Price Caspian

NOTE: I don't know if anyone's noticed but the images of the posters for the movies in the reviews are links to the page for that movie on imdb.com. Now, starting with this one, the post title is a link to the page for the movie on rottentomatoes.com

I mentioned in my review for The Hulk that we managed to see two movies that weekend. On Sunday, the girls were both invited to a birtday party that kicked off with all the girls going down to Island Bay to see Prince Caspian. The boys are friends with the birthday girl's older brother and we occasionally hang out with their family and we wanted to see the movie anyway, so the rest of us sort of tagged along. The Island Bay Cinema is a 'boutique' movie theatre. I'm pretty sure that there's only two screens and each one seats maybe ... fifty people?

We took up about a quarter of the seats for that show, I think.I've read all of the Narnia books more times that I can remember and Price Caspian was never my least favorite, that honor is reserved for "The Silver Chair", but it's probably right above that. So I haven't been really geeked out to see this or anything. Since it's nearly my least favorite, I can't even remember the last time I actually read the book, but from what I remember, the movie was pretty faithful to the sounce material. The film, like the book, is a little darker and a lot more action oriented. I just don't find the material terribly engrossing. It's my understanding that this book had to be next since it's the only other one besides The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe that has all four of the kids in it and for the sake of continuity, the studio wanted to make the movie before the kids got any older. That does mean, however, that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is next, since it has Edmund, Lucy and Caspian in it, and I am totally geeked for that as it was always my favorite.

So, the kids liked it, and they're the target audience so it couldn't have been that bad. I got exactly what I expected so I'll have to give it ...

Three Stars.

Review: The Incredible Hulk

I'm going fairly flat out at work, we've got some stuff that has to deliver on Monday so it been a long week. We did get out to see a couple of movies last weekend, on Saturday we wen't out for dinner and a movie with Guy and Di. We went to Matterhorn for dinner, which, considering we usually just grab a kebab or thai or some such thing at the mall where the theatre is, was quite the deviation from the norm. The food is very good, but a bit on the pricey side. Well north of two bills for four and during the paying for dinner phase of the evening I insited on splitting it 50-50 and then made the mistake of letting Guy go first, since he the promptly paid for the whole thing. We ended up seeing the big green guy. I obviously, and ever so graciaously, paid for all the movie tickets. There wasn't a lot of quality cinema to be had last weekend and The Hulk was the least of all evils. Hulk was never one of my favorite comic book characters, although I remember watching the tv show a fair bit when I was young. It's a pretty good comic book/action movie, but in the back of my mind the whole thing just served as a way to get the viewer to the inevitable fight scene between The Hulk and The Bad Hulk at the end of the movie. It was a 'reboot' as Marvel, just like everyone who saw it, tried to forget the first Hulk movie had ever been made. There's and interesting cameo by Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, as well as several "Stark Technologies" labels on military equipment throughout the movie. It seems like Marvel's trying to keep all their properties in the same universe, which is nice. Decent movie, far better than the first.


Three Stars

Review: Untraceable

This was another one of those "well, everything else that's out looks like it sucks" movie. Not a whole lot to say. Diane Lane is an ass kicking FBI agent who, well, kicks some ass. It's actually pretty gory in a 'Saw' kind of way, although it a lot less 'torture-porn' than Saw, or Hostel or any other movies in that vein. When the best thing you can say about a movie is "it didn't suck" then I guess that there's not much to say. This one scores a bullseye on the fiftieth percentile for




Three Stars

Review: Indiana Jones

I'm not going to beat around the bush here. It's, like, two o'clock in the morning and I'm writing this while utterly failing to sleep so I'm just going to give you the pros and cons.

Pros: Karen Allen is in it. I'm not sure why this made such a difference to me. Perhaps it brought the whole story around full circle.

Cons: Everything else. The story was awful. The direction was awful. The acting was awful. The visual effects were barely competent. There was too much action for the run time so the pacing was rushed. There was no chemistry between Ford and Allen. The villians were barely one dimensional. Every time they went for campy it came off as just corny. There were at least three, three action sequences that could have been replaced with, oh, I don't know, an actual story. For fuck's sake. Twenty years? Twenty years we waited with these jerkoffs stroking themselves off with "well it has to be the right movie" and "we all have to agree". Are you fucking kidding me? I have never in my life left a movie theatre with a stronger feeling that the people involved really couldn't care less if I was entertained or not, as long as I bought a ticket. Are Lucas and Speilberg really that desperate for cash? Jesus Christ, I would've just sent them twenty bucks and we could've all saved ourselves a lot of trouble.


Two horribly dissapointing stars

Review: Iron Man

I like the comic book movies, even when I don't know, or don't follow the comic. I know that I'm going to get a lot of the things that I like to see in movies. Action, Good vs Evil, action, flawed heroes, action. This movie does not disappoint. Now I never followed the Iron Man comic. Xmen was always more my speed in the Marvel universe so when I first started seeing the trailers for this movie, I must say that I was not impressed. Guy in a suit? Flies around? Hello, that movie was called The Rocketeer and it came out like 46 years ago. I figured that it would get a pass. A funny thing happened. As it got closer and closer to the release date of the movie, the trailers got better and better and better. Before you know it I was pretty interested in at least giving it a shot. So Sunday rolled around and we put it to a vote and everyone seemed interested in seeing it. So off the STFU&GBTW clan goes to the Island Bay Cinema, a nifty little boutique/cafe movie theater in, of all places, Island Bay. The ratings were M (PG-13 for you Yanks) for "mild violence", W and I were hoping that we weren't taking everyone to some blood soaked gore fest masquerading as a friendly comic book movie.

We need not have worried, there's some "horrors of war" in the opening sequence, but it's played pretty subtly. Our hero is also a serial womanizer and that's played very low key as well. None of that, however, really has anything to do with how much ass this movie kicked and I'm here to tell you my friends, it was a considerable amount. "Why?" you ask because you're lame and haven't seen it yet. "Why is it so good?". Well, I will tell you. Was it beacuse of the awesome plot? No. The plot was typical comic book movie good but not great. Was it because of the fantastic visual effects. Yes they were fantastic, but no. Was it Jon Farveau's brilliant direction? NO. I will tell you why. I will tell you in three little words. This movie was awesome because of Robert ... Downey ... Jr. He was just flat out awesome. He made the movie great. If you don't see this movie, then you hate America. The kids all loved it. You must see this movie.

PS. I don't mean to nit pick, but I'm from SoCal so I'm afraid I must. When a billionaire industrialist super-genius gets home from spending three months in a cave in Af-fucking-ghanistan and says that he wants two things, first an American cheeseburger and second, a press conference does he get out of the limo at the press conference with a BK bag in one hand and a Whopper in the other? No! Fucking product placement. Fucking In-And-Out. IN-AND-OUT god damnit. He would go to fucking In-And-Out a get a double double. BK my ass. Minature fusion reactors in his chest, that I can believe, but no In-And-Out? it strains credibility and completely blew my suspension of disbelief, but still, I gotta give it ...



Five Ass Kicking Stars

Review : Gone Baby Gone

I had heard good things about this movie. Of course I heard great things about "No Country for Old Men" and I fucking hated that movie. So on top of high expectations, you've got a star turned director and difficult subject matter. So I'm a little leery going in to this one. I had nothing to worry about becuase This ... Movie ... Was ... Awesome. It was brilliant. It was well paced. It was thought provoking, engaging, moody and emotionally powerful. I left the theatre thinking "Holy shit, Ben fucking Affleck not only might get nominated for a best director Oscar, he could actually win". The thing is, I thought that because in New Zealand, this movie came out in 2008. In the US, where this kind of thing matters, this movie came out in 2007, which means it was eligible to be nominated for the Academy Awards that just happend a couple of months or so ago. And that, constant reader, means that this brilliant directorial debut not only did not win an Academy Award, it did not get nominated. IT DID NOT GET NOMINATED IN THE YEAR THAT THAT PIECE OF SHIT "NO COUNTRY FOR SHITTY MOVIES" WON THE OSCAR FOR BEST DIRECTION. And THAT is a fucking travesty. A crime of epic proportions. It makes me shake my fist at the sky and cry out at the universe "why do I work in this god forsaken business?"


Five Stars