Post-Summer Movie Roundup Extravaganza!!

I realize I don't update this blog much; I have largely shifted over to Facebook for social stuff. But I still enjoy using my writing skillz (such as they are) and I don't know how to post movie reviews on Facebook, so I thought I'd take some time to toss my thoughts out on a bunch of summer movies I've seen. The goal is short and sweet. Here goes:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
This movie was awful. It was marketed as half-dramatic character exploration and half incredible action movie. In reality, it was all ass.
Two big problems: first, all of the cool action was in the trailers and previews. All of it; there was nothing left in the movie. Bad move.
Second, it was like they took 20 or so pages from random Wolverine comics, shuffled them, and said "Let's film this just the way it is." I mean seriously. The title says "X-Men Origins" and yet they gloss over 98% of the characters life in under 10-minutes and leave us with a shoddy collection of cliché-ridden scenes of monstrously inconsistent acting. The filmmakers couldn't decide whether to take the material seriously or not. And after The Dark Knight, this kind of drivel doesn't cut it anymore. The bar has been substantially raised and Wolverine thought it was a limbo competition.

Star Trek
This movie was shockingly awesome. I once swore off all things Star Trek; I have now recanted. This is hands-down the best material produced from the entire Star Trek mythology. Director J.J. Abrams managed to take the most worn-out, abused franchise in entertainment history and infuse a level of emotion, action, and visual awesomeness that has never been associated with Star Trek. I particularly liked Kirk and Bones, though for opposing reasons: Chris Pine's Kirk was a fresh, original take on a character dominated by The Shat, while Karl Urban's Bones was an impressively accurate homage to DeForest Kelley's originating incarnation of the character.
Overall one of the best movies of the summer and successful in getting me excited for more Star Trek, a feat that is far more impressive that you think...

Angels & Demons
This movie was way better than The Da Vinci Code. But you know what? That's not saying a damn thing. I don't think Dan Brown is a very good author. His books are entertaining because they are well-researched, have intriguing puzzles, and really short chapters; the kind you can read on the walk from your front door to your car. Rare is the filmmaker that can take an awful book and make an awesome movie. Ron Howard, despite two attempts, is still not that filmmaker. A&D is far superior to TDVC, but only because it abandons all narrative exposition and resorts to absurd action vignettes; like locking Tom Hanks in a library room with no oxygen and no manual release on the door. Sure, it's tense while watching it, but afterwards you call BS and go buy another ticket to the far more realistic Star Trek. Seriously: Star Trek is more realistic.
On the plus side, it’s nice that they didn’t insult and deride Christianity as badly as The Da Vinci Code. It was only, like, ¾ as much…

Terminator: Salvation
T4 is a remarkably well-made action movie with some staggeringly flawed plot-holes. It was expensive, but every dollar is on screen; the movie is a two-hour non-stop action scene, with some ground-breaking visuals and a pleasantly menacing tone throughout (Yes, pleasantly menacing; you don’t want a feel-good tone in a movie with the word Terminator in the title…) The acting is solid, there are some great twists, a surprise Arnold appearance, and it is clearly meant to stand as the first in a probably new trilogy.
The biggest problem: some apparent script alterations meant that instead of one strong hero character, we are presented with two diminished protagonists. Sadly, I suspect that once Christian Bale signed on to play John Conner, that role was vastly expanded to exploit the marquee name. The real hero is Sam Worthington's Marcus, who has a clear hero's journey and emotional arc spanning the film. But it's not till the movie is over that you realize John Conner's contribution to the story was negligible; there was a huge imbalance between character exposure and contribution. But hey…when you have the star of the billion-dollar Dark Knight, whaddaya gonna do?
The movie also ended in one of the silliest scenes ever tacked onto an otherwise dark, gritty film. Ad hoc airfield heart surgery? Really? Couldn't you move this typically major medical operation into a quasi-sterile environment? Or pretend to? Something? Come on...
Otherwise, an incredible spectacle that brought the series back to its violent, dramatic roots from the campiness of T3.

Night at the Museum 2: Blah, Blah, Whatever
More of exactly the same as the first movie, but with Hank Azaria, who is funny because he does half the voices in the Simpsons.

Drag Me To Hell
This is one of the BEST movies of the year. I enjoy a good scare, and this movie made me jump so bad in the first 5 minutes that I poked myself in the eye and ripped a contact lens. I don't remember the last movie that really freaked me out for its entire running time. And what's more, the movie accomplishes this within a PG-13 rating, which impresses me simply because I don't like scary movies that rely on graphic violence and gore to creep me out.
As far as the movie itself, the premise is simple (girl meets gypsy, girl makes gypsy mad, gypsy curses girl with demon, girl has bad week) and the execution flawless by director Sam Raimi, returning to his horror roots after an abysmal raping of the Spiderman franchise with his third entry. I loved the music, the tension, and the genuine scares, though my heart could only handle one viewing in theaters.

Up
Another flawless movie by Pixar. Sometimes I'm skeptical that Pixar's ideas for movies are too far-out to be successful. I mean seriously: an old man and a cub scout in a house flying through the air attached to balloons?
And yet it worked. It worked really, really well. The movie seamlessly vacillates between scenes of extreme humor and extraordinary sadness, all with a sense of adventure that makes the viewer actually wish they were there. After a summer of loud, mindless action, this movie was the first one where story and character were clearly a first priority with action and spectacle a strong but distant second.
Also, the best 3D movie I've yet seen, with a vast majority of the objects onscreen in 3D, as opposed to just gimmicky random elements, ala Beowulf.

The Hangover
The best comedy of the year. The concept is simple but brillaint: four friends have a bachelor's party the night before one gets married, they party so hard they forget everything and the groom disappears, and the rest of the friends have to find him by reconstructing what happened during their accidentally drug-induced nighttime antics. The structure of the movie allows for a non-stop barrage of hilarious comedic set pieces. Some fail, but the vast majority are great and they come so fast that if you get bored, wait 2 minutes and something will make you die laughing again.
Another nice change of pace from all the loud action movies of the summer.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
This movie is the worst movie I've seen in memory, and yet has the best action sequences of the summer.
I enjoyed the first Transformers because I was pleasantly surprised that they made a watchable live-action movie based on toys from 25 years ago; it wasn't hard to impress me and the fact that the cars and chicks and robots were always filmed beautifully was a nice bonus.
Sadly, Michael Bay is like a singular-minded machine. Instead of taking feedback from the first movie and focusing on the good and trying to eliminate the bad, he simply said "Hey, people liked the first movie, so let's do the same thing, but times a thousand!!" So yes, the action scenes are bigger and longer, there are way more robots, and there is much more Megan Fox on-screen. But the problem is that the awful dialogue, worthless storyline, and utterly superfluous scenes are also monumentally expanded. I let the paper-thin plot of the first movie slid, but I didn't expect them to try to get away with even less story; there are 22-minute episodes of the Transformers cartoon with more narrative depth. Megan Fox is clearly infinite shades of hotness, but in a 2.5 hour movie, she so underutilized as anything but eye candy that I felt sorry for her.
In reality, I love giant robots fighting, and this movie delivers. But sitting through 1.5 hours of cinematic trash for 45 minutes of impressive visuals is too painful; I literally left the theater feeling that my brain had been physically assaulted by the stupidity of the movie.

Moon
Moon is one of the best science fiction movies in years. This one-man film features Sam Rockwell (Guy from Galaxy Quest) in a fascinating story about a man who is the only worker at a moon base harvesting some kind of fuel from moon rock; when another person shows up that looks exactly like him, he has to figure out if he is losing his mind or if something else is afoot.
Moon avoided most every sci-fi space cliché (a few of which riddled the excellent Sunshine) and focused on the emotional shock and practical challenges of a character facing a seemingly impossible situation. As a super-low budget independent film, this movie was the best science fiction movie of the summer up through July, utterly shaming the studio-produced Transformers and Terminator, who largely didn't manage an even remotely original idea between them.

The Hurt Locker
I've seen several Iraq war movies, and I hated them all; they always focus on the politics and impact on people who have only peripheral contact with the actual conflict.
The Hurt Locker is a whole different beast. This gripping, ridiculously intense action movie keeps its focus solely on the soldiers on the ground; the men doing the work of the war. Like Black Hawk Down, the focus on the experience of the soldiers compels the viewer to invest so much more emotionally into the characters that you palpably feel the strain they are under.
The movie follows a bomb squad in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004 at the height of the IED era, when terrorists were killing US soldiers every day with a wide variety of ad hoc bombs. The main character is the man whose job it is to disarm the bombs. Director Kathryn Bigelow wisely presents more than a series of tension-ratcheted scenes where the men simply disarm sequentially bigger bombs. The story follows the character through a series of encounters that show just how deadly any situation in war can be, whether it relates to their specific duty or not.
Along with Moon, this independent film was far superior to virtually anything else I've seen this year; particularly any other action movie.

Public Enemies
Another Michael Mann film that, along with Heat, Miami Vice, and Collateral, shows that testosterone-fueled action movies can be as intelligent (never gets old!) as they are devoid of substantial female characters (gets tiring.) Mann has a gift for crafting strong narrative action movies, and Public Enemies earns its place in his repertoire. However, unlike his other efforts, this movie rises and falls on the star, Johnny Depp. Depp has always been a versatile actor, but his significantly heightened profile of the last few years means that even when he turns his attention to a role utterly different from Jack Sparrow, it is difficult to recalibrate your mind to not keep asking "When is he going to ask for some rum?"
The cinematography of this movie was unique, presenting an entire film that looked like a History-channel documentary re-enactment. Seeing the two big action set-pieces filmed in this way was technically impressive and helped divert from the film's biggest flaw: the 'hero' of the film, John Dillinger, was a scum-bag murderer who deserved every bit of justice and pain he received. This movie bugged me the same way Depp's Blow bothered me: by glamorizing a genuinely horrible criminal's life. To its credit, Public Enemies features Christian Bale as a tough FBI agent tracking down Dillinger, but makes the questionable decision to close the movie mentioning that the real-life crime-fighter Bale portrays committed suicide many, many years after the events of the film. This context-less footnote seemed like a final, insulting "Screw you" to the sacrifices made by many American lawmen who died trying to bring Dillinger to justice.
This movie was good, but a watch-it-once kind of film; probably won't see it again...

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
I loved HP5 and thought it was better than the book. But HP6 is my favorite book and translating it to film in a franchise series that I already consider on shaky ground was a risk. In the end, I did enjoy the movie, but it had a couple serious challenges; one inherit to the story and one caused by the filmmakers.
First, the movie had no villain. True to the book, the movie features Harry and Co. discovering and beginning the grand search for the horcruxes. Voldemort does not appear in the movie at all and anyone familiar with the book AT ALL knows that the final showdown is staged, draining it of any real tension. Without a villain making an appearance, there is no central conflict to the story and it ultimately comes off as a 2+ hour preface to the real finale. The book did not seem like that; it was populated with numerous scenes of Harry and Dumbledore hunting for clues in the past and piecing together the mystery of Voldemort's life. And within the medium of the written word, there was plenty of tension and excitement in this path of discovery. But as a movie, this was mostly glossed over or completely eliminated, to be replaced with...
...my second problem: the filmmakers chose to make the film less of a narrative-driven adventure and more of a high-school romantic comedy/drama. Sure, the romantic relationships of the characters were important in the book, but when did the fight against evil get completely sidelined by a hormonally-infused after-school special about teenage love? It seemed like a cheap cop-out to avoid the complexity involved in filming and editing the non-linear investigation into Voldemort's past.
Overall, it's still one of the best Potter movies, but I was a little let down since I actually really dislike the seventh book (Harry Potter and the Extended Camping Trip.,) I am angry they are somehow splitting it into what will likely be two inexorably boring films, and that they probably justified this decision by eliminating the important final scenes of book six from this film and shuffling them into movie seven or eight (Harry Potter and The Stupidly Lucky Defeat of Ultimate Evil By A Wizarding Technicality.)

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
The good: super-ninjas (Snake Eyes, Storm-Shadow), super-hot chicks (Scarlett, Cover Girl, and Baroness), one good action scene (blowing up Paris), and half-decent twist to the end.
The bad: literally everything else.
Sure, it was better than I expected. But I expected s**t, so impressing me required nothing more than a couple beautiful women and a scene with ninjas fighting. One nice thing: unlike Transformers (another movie based on 25-year old toys...TOYS, for crying out loud...) the actors did not make vain attempts to take the material seriously. Dennis Quad filmed all his scenes with a look in his eye that said "No, I'm not trying, because seriously: anything I do on camera is more professional than you playing with dolls as a 9-year-old."

District 9
The best movie of the summer, bar none. Like Moon and The Hurt Locker, District 9 is another independent movie, but produced by Peter Jackson and featuring aliens and some of the grittiest violence this side of Battlestar Galactica.
A couple years ago, Peter Jackson agreed to produce a Halo movie. The director he picked (Neill Blomkamp) had never made a feature film. Result: Halo movie canceled. So PJ gave Neill enough money to make D9; a chance to prove he could handle gripping science fiction action. And wow...District 9 is The Stuff.
The movie starts as a documentary set in an alternate present day, 20 years after an alien ship appeared over South Africa. The insectoid occupants are without a leadership caste and seem unusually stagnant in intelligence or motivation to do anything whatsoever; like an ant colony with no queen. The government eventually resettled the million or so aliens in a ghetto in Johannesburg and largely ignored them, trying instead to co-opt their weapons technology which even the aliens themselves seem unable or unwilling to use.
Long story short: the film follows a seemingly bumbling housing administrator on a harrowing journey as he is involuntarily immersed in the alien's underground culture. To go into any detail would ruin a fascinating and remarkable story. Suffice it to say that that amidst the incredible action scenes and hyper-realistic portrayal of a supposedly fictional world, there is a powerful social commentary being presented to the audience regarding our own flawed concepts of race and rights; it is no coincidence that the film is set in the country ruled by the evils of apartheid for decades.
This is the best science fiction movie in years (better than the also excellent Moon) and as far as I'm concerned qualifies Blomkamp to get started on a Halo movie.

Inglourious Basterds
I only like half of Quenten Tarantino's movies: Inglourious Basterds, Kill Bill, and Pulp Fiction. I completely hate the rest. But this is arguably the best of the three films I do like.
What I didn't realize going into Inglourious Basterds is that it is a World War 2 fable; it is different than any other WW2 movie because it presents a fictional tale that has no bearing whatsoever on real events or history. It springs from every boy's childhood fantasy of making a movie about killing all the Nazis. Raiders of the Lost Ark was the closest thing to fulfilling that fantasy until now.
By the way, Inglourious Basterds is not an action movie; it is a dialogue-heavy drama. There are a few brief, intensely violent scenes, but they are hardly the movie's strengths.
The real strengths lie in Tarantino's dialogue (as usual), and the remarkable characters, particularly Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine, Chritoph Waltz' Hans Landa, and Til Schweiger's Hugo Stiglitz. Aldo and Hans are perfectly acted and intrinsically fascinating, entertaining characters. Hugo Stiglitz has the greatest character introduction of any movie ever; worth every penny of admission alone.
I won't ramble on. Inglourious Basterds is a wonderful movie to end the summer. I suspect it will be the first Tarantino movie that I could recommend to people without any real reservations; it is rated R, but is clearly the most mild QT movie so far.

Bonus:
Avatar (20-minute IMAX preview):
I got to attend the one-off 3D preview of James Cameron's science fiction movie that comes out in December.
Cameron has not made a movie since Titanic in 1997 and has spent the last three years working full-time on this movie. He is also arguably the greatest science fiction filmmaker of all time, having invented the Terminator franchise, made the best Alien movies (1986's Aliens), and created the wholly original and groundbreaking The Abyss. He has stated that Avatar is a movie that he had to wait to make for the technology to become feasible and affordable; he invented some of the camera technology to even make this movie.
And now, $275 million dollars and 3-months from release, he arranged for various IMAX theaters across the country to present a special 20-minute preview that featured several apparently complete and intact scenes from the first half of the movie.
All I can say is WOW. The 3D is unlike anything I've ever seen. It took a few minutes to get used to, but there is a clear depth of field to every image. You can focus on one part of the screen and others seem to go out of focus; just like...wait for it...REAL LIFE! This remarkable technological feat immerses you in the scenes in a way very unlike anything I've ever experienced. It kind of reminded me of what I thought the holodecks in Star Trek would be like. It wasn't a gimmicky thing at all; in a subtle but profound way, it truly puts you in the middle of the movie; it exceeded anything tried in 3D before.
And the world that the film presents is every bit as imaginative and colorful as what you would hope for from a master like Cameron. The alien world the film takes place on has environments and settings that will literally blow your mind.
And though the scenes were likely cherry-picked for their quality, I found that each short scene was so engaging that I was frustrated when they cut away; I wanted to see what happened next! I was only placated because the subsequent scenes were just as engaging.
If I had to find one complaint, I might say that the story appears to be very similar to Dances With Wolves or The Last Samurai: emotionally/physically traumatized soldier quickly assimilates into foreign but metaphysically superior culture and ends up fighting his own people.
Except this is a James Cameron science fiction movie, so it will be awesome. So very, very awesome...