Underworld Awakening 3D Movie Review
At least they don’t glitter in sunlight.
So last night I saw Underworld Awakening in 3D. In fact I saw it on IMAX, which I consider a true test of what I think my time is worth. You see, in order to watch a regular price show I would have had to sit around bored for over an hour. I have always believed that my time is worth more than $7 an hour, so I sprang for the ticket at full price. I also have a liking for the entire Underworld series and wanted to give it the best opportunity to present itself.
Good or bad? Sort of. Kate Beckinsale is back and looking as hot as ever. The action is honestly weaker than any of the previous movies in my opinion. Still decent and exciting, but kind of rote and formulaic. The problems really arise in the plot and pacing. 
The story progresses at warp speed (Enterprise image courtesy of the Star Trek T Shirt category), leaving a messy chum of plot holes, unanswered questions, and highly questionable motivations in its wake. I really feel that a ton of expository footage ended up on the cutting room floor, which is a shame as the entire movie felt criminally short at a lousy 88 minutes. No one would have begrudged Swedish directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein an extra 15-20 minutes of screen time to flesh out the plot a little and give us a reason to care about anyone.
The two directors don’t have a lot of film experience and seem to be more well known for their TV work. This actually makes a lot of sense, as the pacing seems very 2 part TV show-ish. In fact, since most hour shows usually go 40-42 minutes than 88 minutes makes a lot of sense. When you have to fit into a specific time limit you learn to be economical with your development scenes. However, someone should tell them that the only limit cinema movies really has is how long an audience will sit in a seat. Some movies actually have been know to go well over two hours.
Anyway, the story is (once again) about the never ending war between Lycans and Vampires. Given what we learned about the start of the war in the last movie I have to say my sympathy more soundly resides with the Lycans, but they don’t have super hot Deathdealers in leather body suits so I guess I will let it pass. The twist in this film is humans have discovered both races and more or less hunted them into extinction using ammo specifically designed to kill them. Anyway, in a scene so blatantly ripped off from the first Resident Evil movie they might as well have called Selene Alice Selene wakes up from a frozen cryo tube in a laboratory. For some reason (the first example of “what the hell were they thinking?” plot holes) the scientists studying her felt the need to keep her leather outfit in the exact same lab for the last 12 years. She has been frozen and incommunicado for those 12 years while the humans destroyed all her old friends and enemies. She managed to gut a bunch of guards with a scalpel in about 1/4 of a second, which raises the question of if this is what vampires can do how did humans ever wipe them out even with magic bullets? Anyway, her love interest in the movie before last, the vampire/Lycan hybrid Michael, is missing and she wants to find him. She seems to have some kind of mental connection with someone she assumes to be him but actually turns out to be her 12 year old daughter (wait a minute. I might buy into the idea that she was impregnated before being captured (which actually raises a ton of other questions), but do they really expect me to believe that while in a freezer she managed to carry a child to term, give birth to it, regain her pre-pregnancy shape and athletic ability, and somehow has no memory of it?). Anyway, she meets up with another vampire (Theo James-the Inbetweeners Movie, Bedlam, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger) who for no apparent reason knows who she is and wants to help her. He leads her to a hidden coven led by a guy who looks almost exactly like Phillip but isn’t (Charles Dance-Alien, Last Action Hero, Swimming Pool). Lycans attack and the girl gets recaptured by the scientist experimenting on her (Stephen Rae-V for Vendetta, Crying Game). At that point the whole humans hunting vampires story is more or less dropped for the remainder of the film. A human cop decides to help Selene for no discernible reason. Vampire on Lycan hijinks ensues. Stuff gets blown up. Cars get thrown around. The lead in for the next movie is crammed down our throats.
The stars. Vampires and Lycans who do what they are supposed to do, not sparkle in daylight. One star. Kate Beckinsale looking pretty hot. One star. Some of the action was palatable. Two stars. There was a nice merging of the Gothic vampire world with a dystopian slightly futuristic society. One star. Two bonus stars for the fact that I kind of enjoyed the film without being able to put my finger on why. Seven stars total.
The black holes. Plot holes bigger than the IMAX screen I was looking at. One black hole. A complete failure to give us anything in the way of an explanation of what was actually going on. One black hole. A complete lack of motivation from anyone to do anything. What was the villain trying to accomplish? Why did the other vampire help Selene? Why did the cop join up with her? The list goes on and on. One black hole. A lack of consistency in the powers that vampires or Lycans have. One minute Selene is running down a corridor and killing guys so fast they can’t even follow her, the next she is struggling to keep up with a moderately fast moving car. One black hole. The CGI was about as good as you will see on True Blood and the 3D was completely non existent for the majority of the film. Thanks for the headache and souvenir glasses. One black hole. A lot of the action kind of used cheesy camera angles and off camera shooting to create a fake feeling sequence. One black hole. Total: six black holes.
A grand total of one star. Kind of mediocre. The decision to see it or not really depends on the individual. If you are the type to enjoy mindless action and blood, like vampires, have a thing for Kate Beckinsale, or just want to kill an afternoon without involving the majority of your brain cells then by all means see it on a big screen. If you find lame plot holes aggravating and can’t stomach a film that fails to provide you with any insight into what any of the characters are actually thinking than bail. Date movie? Probably not. Too much blood.
By the way, I didn’t give them a black hole for this but if you think the movie got it’s R rating for any kind of nudity or language prepare to be disappointed. It’s all about the blood on this one. Honestly it felt more PG-13 to me except for a few graphic gut scenes.
Thanks for reading. I’m seeing Haywire tonight so look for that review tomorrow. Busy weekend for movies. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Awesome news from the Walking Dead
One thing it appears Dave and I agree on it’s that zombies rule and the Walking Dead is one of the greatest TV shows on right now. Great story, great characters, and great zombies. The good news is I just found out is that AMC has just ordered another 16 episodes is addition to the ones they are showing right now in season 2. Excellent choice. Of course it always makes me laugh when AMC does great original TV like the Walking Dead or Breaking Bad when their initials stand for American Movie Classics. Shouldn’t they be showing Gone With the Wind all day or something?
Something that has always amused me about zombies is the guys who are huge fans and are hoping for the big zombie apocalypse (like Dave) are also the guys most likely to end up zombie chow in the first ten minutes. Most of them seem to think hey are going to run around with a shotgun like on this zombie t shirt and be the hero of the wasteland, but based on what I have seen with regards to physical abilities things are going to go badly for them pretty quick. I’m sure if zombie apocalypse took place in Warsong Gulch they would do fine, but anyone remember the scene in Zombieland when the main guy describes the reason cardio is so important?
Jason
Red Tails Movie Review
Ha ha ha Lucas you fail again.
All you regular readers should have figured out by now that I have a very large axe to grind with George Lucas for ruining a cherished childhood memory of mine, Star Wars (Stormtrooper image courtesy of the Star Wars T Shirt category). If you don’t understand how he did this, or are to young or dumb to realize how much of an amazing epic the Empire Strikes Back is, then I suggest you spend some time at Red Letter Media checking out the Plinkett Star Wars review for Episodes I-III. I have come to the conclusion that while Lucas has claimed responsibility for Episodes IV-VI, the talented people who actually made the movies what they are were fired after EOS was made, leaving us with freaking Ewoks as a predecessor to the eventual doom manifested in many ways but mostly in the form of Jar Jar Binks.
So it would be fair to say that I went into this movie looking for reasons to trash it, but fortunately for me I didn’t have to look hard. The suck reasons are varied and many, and we will get into them in detail shortly, but while this movie may or may not be a commercial success it is definitely riding the short bus to movies. What gives me even more enjoyment of this failure is Lucas had all the elements to make a truly amazing film: a star studded and talented cast, an amazing true story to work with, and stunning CGI effects. All this and the movie still sucks.
Before we get to much farther into this dog let me say that I am a big proponent of civil rights advancement, and have great admiration for the men of the Tuskegee training program. Theirs is a truly amazing story, and one deserving of a truly amazing film. Unfortunately their story fell into the hands of George Lucas, who is to good movies what thalidomide is to pregnancy.
The movie is, of course, the story of the Tuskagee airmen the first group of African American pilots during WWII who fought with honor and pride against the Germans. It tells of Col. A.J. Bullard (Terence Howard-Iron Man, Hustle & Flow, Four Brothers) struggling with the brass in the newly built Pentagon in the face of rampant racism and negative stereotypes. Meanwhile unit commander Maj. Emanuelle Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.-As Good as it Gets, Men of Honor, Jerry McGuire) leads the gang as they start out flying regular patrols well in the rear with outdated aircraft, eventually getting to support a landing and finally flying bomber escorts. He and his crew are punched out of the stereotype paper doll book: there’s the squad leader struggling with alcoholism (Nate Parker-The Great Debaters, the Secret Life of Bees, Felon), the hotshot rogue pilot who can’t obey orders and is constantly on the prowl for women (David Oyelowo-Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the Help, The Last King of Scotland), the younger pilot struggling to prove himself to the veterans (Tristen Wilds-the Secret Life of Bees, 90210 (2008), Half Nelson), the religious nut, the joker (named Joker-anyone remember Full Metal Jacket?), and a couple of country bumpkins. They each have a sub plot and story that does nothing, goes no where, and actually hurts the movie (especially the romance story so worthless and crowbarred it felt like a big weighty dumb story forced into a movie. Hey, I can’t be the king of analogies every day). Each one is an anchor even heavier than the one preceding.
It has been often said that George Lucas is not an actors director, and I don’t think it has ever been more apparent than in this movie. In spite of working with some of the most talented professionals in Hollywood he somehow managed to get them all to act like they were each passing a golf ball sized kidney stone. This combined with dialog that compares favorably only to a flesh eating virus makes each non flying scene feel like being smothered under a burning mattress. The antagonists were even worse. A blatantly racist commanding officer (Bryan Cranston-Malcolm in the Middle and one of my personal favorites, Breaking Bad) was so over the top it was laughable, and the evil German pilot (Lars van Riesen-A Brunette Kiss, Private Peaceful, the Parachute Ball) was laughable cartoonish with lines taken from the Ming the Merciless catchy one liner phrasebook (“Die, you foolish African!”). I guess Lucas can’t do a movie without a goofy fake character with dumb lines.
As for the racism, it was painfully drummed into our heads for the first half of the movie and then somehow just evaporated in the second half. I know Lucas is trying to do something for African Americans (possibly to make up for all the heat he got for racist stereotype Jar Jar) but Spike Lee he is not.
I will say the time spent showing the action in the air was exciting in the same way the dog fights in Star Wars were fun. The CGI was flawless and only once did I see a flight sequence I know for a fact was literally impossible. The one thing Lucas can do is CGI, and he does use it here. However, for every minute spent in the air with exciting combat you spend like five on the ground grinding through some god awful character development.
The stars. I’ll give one star for the cast, especially Cuba Gooding Jr., although he spent the entire movie with a big dumb pipe in his mouth like he was Gen. Douglas MacArthur. What exactly was that supposed to add? One star. The story of the Tuskagee airmen is one that deserves to be told. Two stars. Decent fight sequences and CGI effects. One star. WWII movie. One star. Total: five stars.
The black holes. Acting ran like a chewing the scenery contest. One black hole. Dialog that made listening to drunk guys debate politics sound good. One black hole. Characters so flaccid and ill developed I really didn’t care if and when any of them died. I wasn’t hoping they would die. I just couldn’t worry about them. One black hole. Each sub plot that slowed the story down. One black hole. Very few of the sub plots actually had a conclusion or, for that matter, a point. One black hole. A bonus black hole for the romance sub plot, which pretty much led to the most obvious ending in the history of war movies. One black hole. Pacing and editing from hell. Stuff jumped around in a fast/slow/fast method that made me want to scream. One black hole. At one point Lucas felt the need to channel Hogan’s Hero’s and include a POW escape plot that did absolutely nothing but add in some more worthless ground crap. One black hole. While the African American pilots were heroes of the sky, the portrayal of the Caucasian pilots make them looks like a bunch of undisciplined cowboys, not really reflecting well on the Army Air Corps. One black hole. The scar faced German pilot turned the movie into a comedy. One black hole. The instantaneous reversal of bigotry in such a pat and worthless manner (not so much a resolution as Lucas got bored portraying it and decided to drop the whole thing). One black hole. The film suffered from the war movie “We bought a tank, we are going to show a tank” syndrome. In other words, every scene’s background was so packed with jeeps, trucks, tents, planes, and more jeeps you couldn’t see the ground. One black hole. Some fairly grievous plot holes (If the guys were flying patrols well behind friendly lines, how then did they come across a German train?). One black hole. Total: thirteen black holes.
So a grand total of eight black holes. I feel pretty good about that. The movie, in spite of the great subject matter, was out and out dumb. Of course, the theater was packed and apparently it did pretty well for it’s opening weekend. Odds are very likely that the film will do fine and Lucas will never read this review or if he did even care. He is still rich beyond my biggest dreams. Still, I do feel a bit of satisfaction for this piece of tilting at windmills. I can see why Don Quixote did it. Should you see it? If you like airplanes and combat sure. If you want to somehow support the cause of 1944 Civil Rights sure. If you like good acting, direction, and story telling or want to join me in not supporting Lucas in any way then you should not (incidentally he plans to re release the entire Star Wars franchise in 3D one at a time. I am starting a campaign to not go see any of these and ask you all to join me. Don’t support this. Besides, we all know post production 3D sucks. Don’t fall for the hype)
By the way, Lucas has announced after finishing this dog he was going to retire from film making. I am of two thoughts on this concept. On the one hand I found myself singing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” while doing a little dance in my office chair. On the other hand I kept thinking to myself “Why didn’t the house fall on the witch fourteen years ago before she made the Phantom Menace?” I do wish him a happy and relaxing retirement, with lots of sitting a beach somewhere not working on any of those pesky scripts or anything.
Thanks for reading. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. By the way, you will be seeing a lot of smaller posts by my guy Jason, who works for me and is going to be looking for interesting nerd stuff to post about. Basically these long blog posts actually don’t serve the purpose this blog was created for and I need him to make it actually work. He seems sharp enough. Look for my Underworld review tomorrow. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Can someone please tell me if this is lame or cool?
So apparently Snooki from the Jersey Shore is knowledgeable enough about comic books to actually contribute to a debate about who would in in a Jean Grey/Wolverine fight. The answer, baring anything weird happening, is obviously Jean Grey. Wolverine is cool, but all Jean has to do is fly out of range of his claws and then telekineticely launch him into the sun. Finally a true test of how indestructible adamantium really is.
So on the one hand it’s cool that any girl can actually participate in a comic book discussion in any way. On the other hand, it’s freaking Snooki and it’s freaking the Jersey Shore! I so want anything I am interested in to stay off that radar screen. So what is the answer? Cool or not? That Wolverine face comes from a very cool Wolverine t-shirt that I have, by the way.
Dave just yelled across the room that he is going to see Haywire tonight and probably George Lucas’s last gasp Red Tails tomorrow, so you can look forward to a couple more of his long winded movie reviews this weekend.
Jason
Zac Efron to play Shotaro Kaneda in Akira???
Wow this is lame. Caucasian pretty boy Zac Efron of High School Musical fame is supposed to play Japanese badass Shotaro Kaneda? How does that even make sense? There are no qualified Japanese actors anywhere in the world?
Also, while I am on the subject how can the even decide to ruin great Manga like Akira by excreting a live action movie all over it? Didn’t they learn anything from Dragonball Z? I don’t think you can find it any more, but you should try to see the video of Manga fan Hitler finding out about the changes they made to the story to create that bomb. Vegeta image courtesy of the Cartoon T Shirts, by the way.
Jason
Hey folks.
My name is Jason, and I’m coming on board with Dave as his loyal sidekick, kind of like Robin only not so wimpy (Robin shirt from the Batman T Shirt category). I am going to be posting here reasonably often about nerd stuff I see in order to have this blog do what it is supposed to do and give Dave more time to work on his actual job.
Dave is going to keep on doing all the movie reviews and long nerd rants, and odds are won’t slow down on them. I really don’t have that kind of free time, since I actually have a life, and will be keeping my posts short and sweet. Mostly I will be keeping an eye out for interesting nerd facts about upcoming movies, comic books, and so on. One that I heard the other day has to do with the fact that they are likely to make the Expendables 2 PG-13 instead of R. Big mistake in my opinion, as PG-13 is a recipe for suck. Word on the street (or internet) is that this was a requirement put forth by tough guy Chuck Norris, as he feels the need for kids to see him in all his middle aged glory. Guess what, Chuck? No one young enough to be affected by an R rating gives a rats ass about you. Get over yourself.
Jason
The Iron Lady Movie Review
This film was kind of out of focus, and I don’t mean by the projectionist.
Meryl Streep is an exceptional performer in every sense of the term, and delivers another great performance. The problem is I can’t figure out if the director (Phyllida Lloyd-Mamma Mia!, Gloriana) actually likes or hates Margaret Thatcher. I went in kind of expecting a tribute to one of the greatest world leaders of the 20th century, with highlights and low points presented in an interesting manner that included contributing personal moments and insights. You know, what a good movie would have. Instead we got a disjointed series of vignettes that seem to gloss over her triumphs and linger lovingly over Lady Thatcher’s mistakes and failures while alternating to the present where we get to see an ailing woman dealing with dementia. It’s like if you made a movie about a family trip to Disneyland but had 2/3rds of the footage be of them looking for their car in the parking lot at the end of the day.
This looks like another chance to use my recently coined term script confusion, but a more colloquial and possibly accurate term might be fence sitting. Growing up in the 80’s Thatcher had a well deserved reputation as a ball busting bitch (I mean that term with enormous respect). As a staunch ally to our country she was always perceived as a good person, but she definitely had her issues. However, this movie takes her triumphs and makes them into miniscule points that bookend long exploration of her failures, including the decline of her career, while completely glossing over the majority of her very serious personality issues (her total contempt for the poor and unemployed, not to mention her attitude towards other women). The director seemed unsure if she wanted to praise or denigrate Margarette Thatcher, and consequently never really committed far enough in either direction.
Interspersed between these vignettes was the story of a lonely old woman dealing with dementia and the death of her husband that was as depressing as possible without actually featuring your ex girlfriend sleeping with someone else on screen. I’m not kidding here. We are talking Leaving Las Vegas depressing. This over story only managed to break up any decent momentum the historical story had going and cast a terrible pall over every scene in the movie. SPOILER ALERT INCOMING. And does the film end with a scene of Margaret Thatcher’s triumph and happiness? No. It ends with her political career ending in ignobility and failure, more or less wandering down a corridor in an Alzheimer haze.
As you may have inferred from my rant so far, the story is of the infamous Iron Lady, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. There are two stories going in side by side, but as the main one seems to be a go nowhere plot about her failing years, I will sum that one up with she gets old, deals with the death of her husband, packs up his things for charity, and wanders off. The rest of the movie is a Cliffnotes version of her career, starting as the daughter of a grocer and advancing her politically as she runs for office, gets married, and becomes Prime Minister. The highlight seems to be her actions during the Falklands War, when she kicked the crap out of major world superpower Argentina. The rest of the events all seem to blur together with no real resolution. Somehow she managed to turn the economy around, but there is no real indication how she did it. There are about 1,000 scenes of riots, and the image of rioters beating on the sides of her car recurs several times. When she first gets into office the story seems to be about the trade unions destroying the economy of Great Briton, but then two scenes later the unions are gone and the economy prospering with no word of how it was accomplished. With a few exceptions this story about one of the most powerful and influential women in modern Western politics seems to treat her more like a passenger on a bus than the person behind the wheel.
The other thing that fails miserably in this film is the fact that due to the disconnected pacing and editing at no time do we actually get to connect with Meryl Streeps character. Just as you start to feel something for the crazy old lady hallucinating about her husband it cuts to her bitching out another minister in Parliament, and just as you start to connect to her as a political savvy woman struggling to make her way in the boys club of British government we cut back to her asking about her son visiting when he is in South Africa. There is nothing solid for the audience to latch onto and connect with. Meryl Streep is such a good actress that to treat her performance with such disregard for the continuity of the story is almost a crime. It’s building a house with the best bricks money can buy and assembling them with spit and chewing gum.
The stars. Meryl Streep delivers the best performance possible given the flailing vehicle she was forced to drive. One star. Some of the history was interesting. One star. For such a mediocre script, the dialog was surprisingly good, although that might just be me once again being taken in by British accents. One star. Her husband Denis (Jim Broadbent-Moulin Rouge, Gangs of New York, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) was fun and entertaining, although definitely felt 
out of place like a clown at a funeral (clown image courtesy of the Science Fiction T Shirts category). I won’t black hole them for that, as I think the movie needed some kind of comic relief. One star. Total: four stars.
The black holes. Really, really depressing to no purpose. Two black holes. Disjointed editing. One black hole. Pacing was awful. The scenes with Thatcher as a decrepit crazy woman dragged on and on, while the scenes with her as an effective and capable leader were rushed through at high speed, almost as if the director resented having to do them and was just trying to get them out of the way. One black hole. Meryl Streep really not given the proper treatment to deliver her normally great performance. One black hole. No sign of character development or anything for the audience to connect to. One black hole. The entirety of Thatcher as a senile old biddy was completely unnecessary and pointless. Normally I would give this one black hole, but since this seems to be the majority of the screen time I will bump it up to two. At the end of the movie I found myself wondering what the entire point of the movie was. I actually have a theory on the directors actual purpose that I will get into in the conclusion. One black hole. Overall I left the theater feeling like I had just wasted my time and money. One black hole. Total: nine black holes.
A total of five black holes. If you are a huge fan of the Devil Wears Prada and/or Meryl Streep see it just to see it, but I don’t think you will come away with anything worthwhile. While writing this review I did a little research and have come up with a theory as to what was really going through the director Phyllida Lloyds cranium on this on. You see, she is best know for directing opera, a genre not really known for its uplifting message. I suspect she was infused with a desire to make a film about a lonely old woman dealing with her dead husband and uncaring children. The scenes I wanted to see of Margaret Thatcher changing the face of Briton were rushed, stilted, and treated as secondary to scenes of her making two eggs, one for her and one for her eight year dead husband. Seems a shame. However, this production was entirely funded by the UK Film Council, and trying to hold a public commission to the same bar as a Hollywood production is an exercise in futility. I’m just surprised that the Britons wouldn’t want to see Thatcher painted in a more positive light. Of course, when we do a movie about an American historical figure we tend to look for all the dirt possible (most recently J. Edgar), so perhaps the attitude here actually reflects the prevailing attitude most Britons have towards her. I don’t know.
Thanks for reading. Not a lot coming out until Friday, so I will probably do more end of the year stuff tomorrow or just blow it off entirely. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu to get announcements of new reviews, or just subscribe to my RSS feed. Talk to you all soon.
Dave
Joyful Noise Movie Review
Here is a movie to make you wish human beings had never developed vocal cords.
And I’m not talking about the singing. In fact, the music was one of the few redeeming qualities of this film. I am not a real fan of Gospel, but can appreciate the sound and understand what a powerful tool it can be for the advancement of the Christian pantheon (I consider myself more agnostic than anything else, although if I were forced to choose a specific religion I think I would roll with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster). No, it’s not the singing that made me want to stuff chewing gum in my ears. It’s the freaking dialog. If I have to hear Dolly Parton or Queen Latifah spout out another hillbilly, earthy country platitude (“If the jury is full of foxes then the chicken is always guilty”) I will be forced to go on a berserk chainsaw rampage.
The story is the unnatural offspring of Sister Act and Footloose, with lingering eye contact made with the Bad News Bears during conception. The proud parents had their child and, because someone else had already used the name Glee, ran with Joyful Noise. The weird thing is when you make a movie out of two mediocre movies you normally only take some elements from each and combine them into a crappier movie. What director/writer Todd Graff (The Electric Company, the Abyss, Five Corners, Stranger Days) did was, with the exception of the gangsters trying to kill Whoopie Goldberg, take ALL the elements from those two movies and pile drive them into one script until the screen is bursting with badness like rancid corpse stuffed into a corset. I mentioned Glee because that appears to be Mr. Graff’s favorite show, and honestly this movie reads like an entire season of bad TV compressed into 117 minutes with each episode creating yet another 5-10 minute subplot.
Fragmented doesn’t begin to describe this story. It is even more fragmented that the horrible New Years Eve I reviewed last year, although at least all the characters in this film know each other. The sub plots are legion. There’s the “main” plot of the losing church choir winning the national Joyful Noise competition. There’s the competition between Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah to be the choir director. There’s Queen Latifah’s hot 16 year old daughter rebelling against her mother’s restrictive nature, as well as her romance with Dolly’s grandson. There’s her Asperger brother trying to deal with being different from everyone else, learning to play the piano, and taking his sunglasses off. There’s the small Georgia town suffering from economic collapse. There’s the choir singer who’s father’s hardware store is closing. There’s Dolly Parton dealing with the death of her husband by ignoring it completely. There’s Queen Latifah’s husband joining the army to get away from her and the two kids. There’s Latifah’s struggle to provide for her family. There’s the grandson’s checkered juvenile past. There’s another girl hooking up with a guy and killing him after the first night (that subplot resurfaces later and somehow hijacks the whole story at the end). There’s the preacher who doesn’t want to spend money on the choir. There’s the struggle that the grandson and Dolly have to update the choir with more than just traditional music in order to win the big contest (oh yeah, somehow winning the contest is integral to the survival of the town. Still not sure what that was about). There’s the preacher hating the new music and pulling out his support. There’s the other kid who gets into a fight with the grandson over the daughter’s affection but later joins the choir as the worlds greatest guitar player or something. The list goes on and on.
In the credits (I read online. I didn’t really stay for the credits. I couldn’t get out of the theater fast enough) it is revealed that Todd Graff’s mother was in a choir, which makes a lot of sense. This movie looks a lot like a self indulgent labor of love, and Graff wanted to stick every small town or choir story schtick he could find into it. Next time I would suggest he make a list of his 20 best ideas and get a third party to whittle them down to like three. Just because you have an idea doesn’t mean you need to execute it.
Before I go on I’d like to say a few words about Dolly Parton. It seems pretty obvious that she is single handedly supporting the plastic surgery and hair care industries. That being said, I can’t argue with the results. She is 66 and looks at most 42-45ish. She also seems to have a sense of humor about it too, and plastic surgery jokes come about in a scene with Queen Latifah that was one of two that I actually enjoyed. Also, while she definitely is a lady throughout the film, her outfits seem designed to emphasis the assets she is known best for, if you know what I mean (her singing voice, obviously. What were you perverts thinking of?)
The story reads like it was written by the second place winner of a 5th grade creative writing contest. I don’t know if I need to get into it too much, as I seem to have covered it in the sub plot rehash. The church choir director (Kris Kristofferson-Blade trilogy, Planet of the Apes(2001)) drops dead during a choir competition, leaving Queen Latifah (Bringing Down the House, Living Single, Taxi) and Dolly Parton (Sweet Home Alabama, Moulin Rouge, Transamerica) up for the gig. Latifah gets it with the goal of winning the big Joyful Noise competition. Dolly’s grandson Randy (Jeremy Jordan-not much of a filmography. Looks like he was in Newsies on Broadway) shows up, falls in love with Latifah’s daughter (Keke Palmer-True Jackson, Cleaner, Akeelah and the Bee), who is a good church girl. At that point the story more or less explodes into the aforementioned subplots like a watermelon with an M-80 stuck in it. Church choir hijinks ensues. No real conflict arises. The story chugs along like a V8 with only three cylinders firing to the inevitable predictable conclusion.
The stars. The music and singing were actually pretty good. One star. The actors, working within the limitations of a bad script and horrible dialog, managed to deliver a decent performance. Kind of like winning a three legged race. One star. Queen Latifah is at her best when she is bitching someone out, and there were two scenes (one with Dolly in particular) that were entertaining that way. One star. Keke Palmer is super cute. One star. Total: four stars.
The black holes. Dialog that made me want to never see another film again. Two black holes. 1 kazillian subplots that went nowhere. One black hole. 1 subplot in particular was especially cringe-worthy. One black hole. Pretty much all the rest of the subplots gave me an attitude that rhymed with “Eye Mont Bare”. One black hole. 
The pacing dragged like trying to pull a corpse to a shallow grave by yourself (not that I would know anything about that. Where did I put that body image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category). One black hole. Glee ripoff. One black hole. Overall story seemed both pointless and dumb. One black hole. A movie that is supposed to be uplifting and heartwarming laced with death and sociopaths apparently not caring about it. One black hole. Two more black holes for generally wasting my time. Total: eleven black holes.
So a grand total of seven black holes. This is another one that was weird in that the audience around me seemed to be enjoying it and laughing. However, I suspect a lot of them came to see it from some kind of church obligation and had to pretend to like it otherwise their friends might think they were not the good Christians they like to think they are. A lot of the laughter sounded forced, like laughing at your bosses bad jokes. Speaking as a creepy loner who couldn’t care less about what the people around me think (if you don’t believe me just look at how I dress every day) the only prayer I was making was for the credits to start rolling. I don’t know. Was it better than tripping and falling into a tree shredder? In most ways yes. Was it better than spending those two hours working on my Doom Fortress in Minecraft? Absolutely not. However, if you are dating a girl who is Christian this could be a good one to see, especially if you are willing to wait until your wedding night for sex.
I’m back to scraping the bottom of the barrel on movies. Nothing to see tonight, but maybe I’ll see My Week With Marilyn. No way there is anything in that film to annoy me. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Thanks for reading. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Contraband Movie Review
I really can’t decide what kind of movie this is or if it was actually good or bad.
I’m going to coin a new descriptive phrase and expect every other review who uses it to send me a $.25 royalty: script confusion. This describes a movie that can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be when it grows up. This film was torn between a crime drama and an action movie. The crime drama felt awkward and haphazard, especially when it is established 10 minutes in that the main protagonist is reputably the greatest smuggler who ever lived. Throughout the crime aspects of the movie the story seems to indicate that secretly it wants to be an action film but, like a transgendered man taking her first steps in high heels, when we actually get to the action scenes they feel awkward, comedic, and tacked on.
That’s not to say this movie is bad. I found that it’s many shortcomings were often times balanced out by it’s more virtuous aspects. The comical gunfight and getaway is balanced out by some very clever smuggling tricks. The over the top main bad guy is balanced out by the very entertaining ship captain. The continuous sequence of narrow escapes is balanced out by a decent plot twist that comes about fairly organically. In fact, the whole movie seems so perfectly balanced that I can’t help but think this was intentional on the part of the director, Baltasar Kormákur. I have in the last year become a big fan of Scandinavian film makers (check out my review of Trollhunter), and while is filmography lacks a lot of main stream releases (Jar City, A Little Trip to Heavan, the Sea) it looks like he might be worth keeping an eye on.
The story. A loser kid Andy (Caleb Landry Jones-X-Men First Class, No Country for Old Men, the Last Exorcist) dumps a cargo of drugs overboard a freighter when it gets boarded by customs agents and now owes a ton of dough to the local campy bad guy Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi-Avatar (the corporate guy), Saving Private Ryan, Gone in 60 Seconds), who is going to kill him in horrible ways if he doesn’t get his money. Andy is the brother of Kate (Kate Beckensale-Underworld, the Aviator, Pearl Harbor) who is married to the most famous smuggler that ever lived, Chris Farraday (Marky Mark Wahlberg-Boogie Nights, the Fighter, the Other Guys). Now it is up to Chris to find the money to pay off Briggs, and given that he has retired from smuggling in order to be a blue collar business owner, his only option is to go back into smuggling. He is aided by long time friend Sebastian (Ben Foster-the Mechanic, the Messenger, 3:10 to Yuma), who has also gone legit with a construction business. They plan to smuggle in a huge stack of counterfeit money (yay for supporting the American economy!) on another freighter.
Somehow he and Andy get hired onto another freighter headed to Panama and meet up with a number of supporting characters plucked fresh from the the ground of the stereotype farm. Once on board Chris catches the eye of the ship captain (the great J.K. Simmons-J. Jonah Jamison from the Spiderman franchise, Juno, the Closer. Spiderman image courtesy of the Marvel T Shirt category), who was easily my favorite character and knows of Chris’s history and is instantly suspicious. They get to Panama in about 45 minutes where Chris gets involved in some kind of local gang lord crime spree. At that point the movie shifts gears into 
what I like to call the Scooby Doo chase sequence, where the story and characters progress only by the most ridiculous sequence of perfect timing and coincidence, like when the bad guy in the rubber costume is chasing Scooby and Shaggy through the corridor with the six doors (you know what I’m talking about). This part feels more that a little hackneyed, which surprised me as most of the rest of the movie seemed pretty well put together. Either Baltasar (what a cool name. I want to name my hypothetical son Baltasar) was trying to convey something I am too dense to pick up on, or he caved in to outside pressure from the studio to make the movie somehow more exciting by hoisting the audiences disbelief a little higher up.
Anyway, smuggling hijinks ensues. A lot of time is spent looking into shipping containers. Some kind of interesting plot twists reveal themselves.
The stars. Decent story. One star. Direction was pretty good. One star. In spite of the whole Scooby Doo portion, overall the pacing was right on target. There was no time that I felt bored or that things were dragging or progressing too fast. One star. Mark Wahlberg delivered a credible performance, in spite of the occasional campy dialog. One star. Decent plot twists, although a perceptive person might have seen them coming ahead of time. One star. Captain Camp was great. One star. In total a decent film that was enjoyable in a kind of bland way, like chewing on gum that has already lost it’s flavor. One star. Total: seven stars.
The black holes. A movie that is rated R for language is a huge waste of potential. It’s like going to jail for stealing socks. If you are going to eat the R rating anyway you might as well throw in more horrific violence, blood, and some nudity. One black hole. Some of the characters, Briggs in particular, seem really over the top. One black hole. Some ocean container sized plot holes. One black hole. Almost all the characters worked on having some kind of New Orleans accent except for Wahlberg, who in spite of the fact that his character supposedly grew up on the Big Easy sounded like he just got off the plane from Beantown. One black hole. While it seemed like a decent movie, I walked out feeling no real connection to the story or any of it’s characters, and honestly struggled this morning to remember the plot and my feelings for it. Definitely a forgettable film. One black hole. Total: five black holes.
A grand total of two stars. Meh. You won’t feel like you wasted your time or money seeing this, but a week afterward it won’t really stick with you. If you can see it cheap cool. If you wait until DVD you won’t really lose anything. There aren’t any cinemagraphics that requires a big screen. Date movie? Sure. Exciting and interesting enough to keep her into it while being bland enough to not offend or overstimulate her. Marky Mark keeps his shirt on for pretty much the whole film so you don’t have to worry about the comparison factor too much. However, this movie is kind of neutral in that it will neither help or hurt you in your campaign to seduce her, so if you haven’t closed the deal yet try to find something more enticing (or better yet, do something more fun and exciting than a movie).
Thanks for reading. I will eventually get the rest of my best of 2011 stuff done, but there are a bunch of new movies I want to see. My best friend tells me he wants my review on Joyful Noise. I will see it, but I suspect he is just screwing with me because he knows this film will drive me nuts. Also I am working on another huge project for work, so I might not get a lot done in the next week or so. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Thanks for reading. Talk to you soon.
Dave
The Devil Inside Movie Review
Most reviews seem to have panned this, but I kind of liked it.
This week is more proof that I have been secretly transported to Bizarro world and that in it most of Bizarro humanity is comprise of freaks and I am the normal one. Everyone loved Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and I thought it was sluggish and confusing. Everyone seems to hate this movie and, to be honest, I really enjoyed it. I found it fun, interesting, and honestly frightening at points, and when I get back to the real, non-Bizarro world I am sure I will find any number of people who agree with me (in the real world I also have a ton of money and women find me irresistible. Bizarro world sucks. Bizarro image courtesy of the Superman T Shirt category).
That is not to say this movie doesn’t have it’s flaws, and I can totally see where a lot of the criticism stems from. We will get into that shortly, but overall I found this movie to be a good time.
What I didn’t find this movie to be, however, was a good value for the money. It is a woefully short 87 minutes and the ending they pulled out of their asses with no sign of any kind of resolution, conclusion, or development. As it is a mock “found footage” documentary this is kind of understandable, but honestly this film looks exactly like a student film that the people working on it got bored and decided to just end it in one fell swoop. The film puts the “ow” in “low budget” and I think there is a distinct possibility they ran out of funds and decided to wrap it up quick.
The movie is presented as a documentary about a daughter named Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade-Why am I Doing This?, Fallen, For Love or Country; the Arturo Sandoval Story) looking into the demonic possession of her mother (Susan Crowley-Born of Fire, Cristabel) with the help of a documentarian named Micheal (Ionut Grama-The Whistleblower, Guber’s Journey, Closer to the Moon) who wants to do a film about exorcisms. They travel to Rome where the mother is locked up in a Catholic mental hospital. In Rome they meet two freelance exorcists, Ben and David (Simon Quarterman-The Scorpian King; Rise of a Warrior, Inside, Perfect Strangers and Evan Helmuth-Garfield, Fever Pitch, Franks Book. Wasn’t the Helmouth the name of the portal to Hell in the basement of the school in Buffy the Vampire Slayer?), both priests who do exorcisms without the consent of the Church. The mother killed three people when they last tried to exorcise her so the Church wants nothing to do with her.
At that point we get a lot of character development. Interviews go on with Ben, David, and Isabella that explore their reasons and motivations for being into exorcism. In a normal film I would be very pleased to see such character depth presented, but in a documentary format I can’t really give props for characters more or less saying “The reason I got into exorcism is blah blah blah”. Fish in a barrel, really. This section drags on a little but the pacing seemed appropriate for a documentary. We get to the actual exorcism and at that point the story kind of drops the character exploration in favor of some scary scenes. A few minutes later someone switches the record player from 33 to 45 (all my older readers should understand that last one) and the story thunders to the conclusion like it activated the booster rocket embedded in its ass. Demonic chaos (haw!) ensues and some stuff that was hinted at never gets revealed.
The stars. Well done, given the limitations that found footage movies must labor under. One star. While it was obviously derived from Blair Witch Project, I didn’t feel like it was really just a remake. One star. The actors were all pretty good, and I liked all the characters. One star. Fernands Andrade is super cute in a wholesome way that I really liked (also brunette, my personal fav). One star. This horror movie was actually scary at points, and presented some creepy and interesting concepts. I found myself jumping at times. One star. Good use of camera and lighting to help set the creepy mood. One star. Good character development and presentation, at least in the first half of the film. One star. The didn’t do the whole camera-man-jogging-so-the-screen-is-constantly-jumping-around thing, which meant I didn’t lose my popcorn. One star. Overall entertaining. One star. Total: nine stars.
The black holes. The movie ended so abruptly I expected the airbag to go off. One black hole. The film felt really, really short and had a lot of padding in the form of characters walking down hallways and so one. Not a lot of meat. One black hole. While the horror buildup was presented with a nice progression once we got into the actual scary stuff the movie was pretty much over. It’s rare that I ask for more gore, but this movie could have used something. One black hole. There was a large number of opportunities for further plot or character development that were left by the wayside. Each character, including the possessing demon, had something hinted at that would have been really interested had we been given a little more. One black hole. Total: Four black holes.
So a total of five stars, which is way more than I expected it to get going in. I had heard this movie sucked and was more or less salivating in anticipation of something really juicy to chew on, but found that it wasn’t bad. In fact, I spent the first 20 minutes really looking for the suck before settling into my seat to enjoy it. Is it worth seeing? Sure, especially if you can see it for $5 like I did. It will do OK on a TV scree, but some of the exorcism scenes might lose a lot, especially the first one. Date movie? For the right girl, yes. Don’t take someone who is religious unless you want to get a religious lecture and a firm handshake at the end of date. Actually, I think this is an excellent date movie. Scary enough to have her holding onto your arm but not so frightening that she gets creeped out on the ride home. There are a couple scenes involving things that might creep out a girl particularly, but for the most part if she has a brain and sense of humor it should work OK.
Thanks for reading. Nothing to see tonight, so I will continue with my end of the year awards tomorrow. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Have a good night, and I will talk to you all later.
Dave
