Watch this.

     It's the trailer for Take Shelter, and it looks awesome.  Happy Thursday, readers.  X-Men review coming this weekend!

 

"Cars 2" may be first Pixar film that totally sucks

    

     It may be #1 at the box office, but with nearly a week of release under its belt, Pixar's latest mistake film, Cars 2, is bombing with the critics.  It has a 33% on rottentomatoes.com, and to put that completely in perspective for you, Mr. Popper's Penguins, a truly awful piece of crap movie, is at nearly 50%.  Good Lord, this is what it must have felt like for the Spartan warlord Leonidas to throw a spear at King Xerxes ear and draw blood.  The gods are mortal after all!

(img source = wot.motortrend.com)

 

Latest member of cast announced for new Del Toro sci-fi flick, "Pacific Rim"

     Charlie Day, who many of you will recognize this Friday when the comedy Horrible Bosses releases to theaters, is the latest cast member to be announced for Spanish director Guillermo Del Toro's newest project, an alien film titled Pacific Rim.  Day's co-stars so far include Idris Elba and Charlie Hunnam. 

      Considering the high volume of comedic roles (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) Charlie Day has filled, it'll be interesting to see him in the Del Toro universe.  My respect for Del Toro is high.  His films have amazing special effects, make-up, and costumes, with story lines full of depth and memorable characters.  Judging from the the film's synopsis on IMDB, this sci-fi action thriller will most likely be along the lines of the Hellboy movies that Del Toro helped produce.  I won't get my excitement up too high for this movie yet though - the release date is nearly two years away in 2013.   

Peter Jackson releases first images of an actor in costume on "Hobbit" set!

      And the winner is....Ian McKellan as Gandalf! 
     YOU'RE WELCOME.

 (image source - EW.com)

Documentary Wednesday: "In Debt We Trust"

     Not the best documentary I have seen, but worth taking a look at if you never ever want to use a credit card again.  From journalist Danny Schechter, who narrates and stars in the film, its format is a little scattered, but you get the picture by the end - America's in a boat and debt from credit lines is a torpedo about to sink us.  Which is a little too sensationalist for my tastes.  Wait, why am I showing you this if I keep saying things I didn't like about it?  Dammit.  It's interesting, there, I said something I liked.  

Awful Fathers in Film

     It's Father's Day today, and as much as this holiday is great for those who are dads, or people who love their dads and are close to them, I can't help but feel sorry for those whose dads weren't the greatest and are estranged from their fathers.  They have nowhere to go today for comfort.  Stores don't tend to sell cards saying, "You weren't a great dad, and I hope you remember that today, because I do everyday".  So I thought it was a good time to compile a list of three movies I immediately think of when the term "bad dad" comes to mind.  I hope it's cathartic to those that need it.

1. Dwight Hansen, This Boy's Life

       Robert Dinero plays the twisted role of Dwight Hansen, one of the biggest egotistical scumbag fathers in this film based on the true life story of writer Tobias Wolff, played fantastically by Leo DiCaprio.  Besides being physically abusive to Tobias and his mother, stealing Tobias' hard earned paper route money, and being a raging alkie, Dwight Hansen is a pretty good stepdad.  In fact he's such a good stepfather, Tobias and his mother run away.  What a swell guy.


2. Winter's Bone

     Want to win Father of the Year?  I know how to get you there.  1. Get into meth production and consumption, 2. Disappear on your family of three kids, and last but not least, 3. make your teenager daughter delve into the seedy underworld of meth labs in the Ozarks to come looking for your sorry ass.  Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of the brave family matriarch doesn't take away from what a jerk off her dad is.


3. Malachy McCourt, Angela's Ashes

       Frank McCourt's father in Angela's Ashes is a deeply flawed character that you feel sorry for at first, but grow to despise.  He at first works hard to provide for his Irish immigrant family and meet the demands of a cold wife, all the while dealing with multiple child deaths in the family.  Still, Robert Caryle as Malachy McCourt ends up in the bad dad category - he'd rather have a swig of whisky than shoes for his children, and eventually deserts his family in their darkest hour.  What a role model for a perfect father figure.


(img source=timeinc.com/totalfilm.com/fandango.com)

Kinda Superb 8

    

     Nothing extraordinary has ever really happened in the sleepy small town of Lillian, Ohio.  It's summer, and Joe Lamb, like any other kid, is spending his time with his friends, particularly focusing on helping his buddy Charles make a zombie film for a local film festival.  Having lost his mother to a grisly factory accident four months earlier, Joe welcomes the relaxation of summer break. His father, a police deputy, is otherwise determined to see Joe spend his summer at a baseball or football camp, away from his odd, filmmaker friends and the loneliness of home.  Joe has other plans - to stay in Lillian, help Charles with his film, and woo the heart of Alice Dainard, the lead actress in Charles' film.  The crew decides to shoot one pivotal scene out by some abandoned railroad tracks in the middle of the night.  After sneaking out, the kids head for the railroad tracks, their microphones, costumes, and trusty Super8 camera in hand.  
     Nothing extraordinary ever really happened in the sleepy small town of Lillian, Ohio.  A train crash on the tracks that night changes all that. 
     And not just any train crash - a train carrying suspicious, live, foreign cargo. The kids' near escape from the disaster they witnessed, a subsequent hush-hush Army take-over of the town, and the strange paranormal phenomenon that slowly builds the anxiety of every resident is the fabric of the new film from Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams, Super 8.  Super 8 is exhilarating, funny, heart-breaking at times, and at other times, scary.  If you take the film at face value, it seems to be the greatest film to come out in recent summers.  However, there are some deep flaws, including plot holes as big as the theater screens the masses are rushing to see this film on, and in the end, they drag the film down. Were it not for a great cast, stimulating special effects, excellent acting and witty writing, it would have been a disappointing disaster.     

     I want to start off first by saying what I liked about this movie, because there are definitely things I loved about it.  First of all, the cast, especially the kids, are all fantastic.  I can't think of a film in recent memory (Mean Creek, maybe?) in which the kids carried the story so well.  For several of the youngsters, this was their first role, which is quite impressive in the case of Joel Courtney, who plays the lead of Joe Lamb, and Riley Griffiths, who plays Charles.  Their futures are bright because of this production.  But the kids couldn't have had such great chemistry without realistic banter, great dialogue, and yes, even a few cuss words in there.  This isn't the Disney channel, guys.  Come on, if my friends and I filmed a train operated by government officials carrying an enormous, pissed off alien,and then watched it crash into a million pieces, I would say "Holy shit!!" a lot too.  Abrams did not shy away from this, and every demographic of his audience should love him for it.
     A lot of reviews I read claimed that this film was basically a rip off of The Goonies and E.T.   I tend to think it's not much of a rip off, just both of them fused together.  There were some cliches and archetypes within the group of kids - a pyromaniac who loves firecrackers, a chunkier kid, a nerd, a stoner, and a sensitive leader-type boy in love with a pretty girl.  But there were twists on the kids' characters that kept them interesting.  The "fat kid" of the group was not a bumbling, clumsy idiot, such as Chunk in The Goonies or Vern in Stand by Me.  He was intelligent, driven, creative, even bossy at times.  This breaks the "rip off" argument in two.

     That's as good a segue as any into what parts made me not like this movie, and ultimately why I thought the ending fell a little flat at best, and was anti-climatic at worst.  First of all, the alien looks and sounds almost exactly like the alien/monster from Abrams' previous POV movie Cloverfield.  No joke.  I actually thought JJ Abrams did it on purpose at first.  Maybe his creation from Cloverfield accidentally stumbled upon some inter-dimensional time and space supernova portal and fell into the storyline of Super 8.  Or Abrams is just lazy.  The screeches, growls, and screams of the alien were the biggest disappointment to me, because, like in Cloverfield, the sound becomes paramount when the filmmakers do not let the audience see what the creature looks like for most of the movie.  Therefore, the audience must depend on what they hear, not on what they see.  It's a shame that what they're hearing gives them deja vu.

      I also didn't like how half-way through the movie, Alice, gets kidnapped by the alien, and surprise surprise, the boys have to rush back into the danger zone to save her.  Don't act like I spoiled anything for you, you knew it was coming.  That's how cliche it is.  It was ultimately unnecessary, because the kids have very little interaction with the alien, save for a few minutes at the end.  They learn that the alien, who has killed a lot of people while running amuck in the town, and ruined countless property, is no more than a poor tortured creature held hostage by a dick head general, and all it wants to do is build its ship and return home.  Many questions about the alien remain unanswered, such as why he took some people hostage, but let others die.  
     In the end, I thought it ultimately fell apart a little bit.  I didn't feel as sympathetic for the alien entity as I wanted to, as much of its back story was rushed or just left unexplained, as were other scenes.  The scene between Joe's father and Alice's father, who was inadvertantly responsible for Joe's mother's death, was done in about a minute, and before you know it, the movie is over, and it isn't until the ride home from the theater that you begin to think about all the things that were missing - a totally coherent plot, and a better emotional investment in the main protagonists.  
     It's a shame that several factors were too poorly executed to make it as great as it could have been.  But the parts that were executed properly saved it in the long run.  And with a movie like Super 8 that has an ever so slight reminiscent atmosphere of Spielberg's old adventure films, critics and general audiences will continue to swarm to the screens to see it. My advice?  Go spend the money and see it at the theaters, as there's a train crash that rivals The Fugitive, and it is entertaining if nothing else.

(img sources = yowazzup.com / cbskzzo.files.wordpress.com) 

Tom Hanks' Son Likes to Kill People

     ....in this new indie comedy with Ann-Margaret and the hilarious Jeffery Tambor.  Ha, almost got you!  Happy Thursday readers.

 

"Super 8" early screenings total over 1.5 million, plus box office stats for the weekend

     Screenings for the Abrams-Spielberg brainchild project Super 8 have met the weekend with not only glowing reviews, but also quite a bit of cash.  Preliminary earnings are already surpassing 1.5 million.  And critics on rottentomatoes.com have it at an 82% approval rating.  

     All things considered, I can't help but feel this movie will literally be Cloverfield and Close Encounters of the Third Kind fused together.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  It'd be like if Darren Aronofsky and Michael Bay produced a movie about a ballerina addicted to heroin that transforms into a robot and goes to space to drill on an asteroid.

Box Office Stats for the Weekend: 

X-Men: First Class - $55.1 million

The Hangover: Part II - $31.4 million

Kung Fu Panda 2 - $23.9 million

(img source = wfiles.brothersoft.com)

Apocolypse and headshots and zombies, oh my.

     Today AMC released the first photo for season two of The Walking Dead, an adaptation of the graphic novel series about a man and his family braving a zombie-ridden barren world after a horrible virus wipes out most of the population.  I'm not sure how this next season will go, seeing as how the first season started off great and then crashed by the fourth episode.  But I suppose anything with zombies deserves a second chance.  Frank Darabont, the series producer and creator, is a little more optimistic, saying today:

"At this moment, I’m standing on a stretch of post-apocalypse interstate in Georgia, 

littered with abandoned cars and blessing my good luck to be reunited 

with our amazing cast, and our fantastic directors and crew. 

Across the board, there are none better. It’s great to be shooting again. 

I think we’ve embarked on a great season.” (insidetv.ew.com)

 

Blast from the Past: "The Silence of the Lambs"

     The Silence of the Lambs is not an easy movie to swallow, but it definitely provides food for thought where present-day thrillers are starving.  Prepare for more eating/food jokes throughout this whole review, by the way.  I have plenty of them. 

     It's embarrassing and sad to say this, but I had never seen this movie before a few nights ago, although its reputation far proceeded it.  Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins deliver compelling performances as an aspiring FBI agent named Clarice Starling and a maniacal psychopathic killer, Hannibal Lector, who develop a precarious and curious relationship while on the heels of a serial murderer named Buffalo Bill.  In desperation to find Buffalo Bill, who loves to skin women and throw them in rivers (who doesn't?), the FBI sends the eager-beaver Starling to a high-security prison to converse with Lector, once a prominent psychiatrist himself, if only to pry any criminally insane secrets from his twisted mind.  
     Starling's character is one so simple it's complex.  At first glance she is a naive hick who couldn't wait to drop out of high school and join any organization that would let her shoot a gun at "them bad guys and such".  In reality, she's a smart woman who's desperate to further her career, save lives, and gain respect from her male law-enforcement counterparts.  All in a days work.  Strangely, she finds the most respect and intellectual stimulation from Lector himself, who develops a protective nature over her, nearing fondness.  
     This movie wasn't so much scary as it was creepy and intense.  Ted Levine as the flamboyant killer Buffalo Bill is an especially ghastly character.  I won't give it all away, but he likes little white dogs and saying "It puts the lotion on its skin" a lot.  The most memorable character, although he has actual very little screen time, is Hannibal Lector by a milestone.  While some critics may point to director Jonathan Demme's earlier works as his best, he certainly didn't harm Foster or Hopkins in their paths to stardom.  Now that's a movie where everybody can save face.  

     

Trailer for American remake of "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

     The "FEEL BAD MOVIE THIS CHRISTMAS"?  Way to self-proclaim it so we don't have to.  Nice Led Zeppelin cover too.