"GI Joe: Retaliation" (GI Joe 2) PG-13
Jon Chu, the director of the Step Up dance movies, takes over for Summers to direct another live action cartoon GI Joe movie, this time trading dance moves for choreographed ninja fighting. Like the last movie, the people doing this enjoyed GI Joe much more than the other tent pole, Transformers and Michael Bay, who had gone on record saying he didn't even play with or like the toys. Clearly Jon Chu's people like GI Joe and decided to pay homage to the newer stories, from Sigma Six to Renegades, and the comic books. Even though S6, Resolute and Renegades were not as well liked, he accurately had fun with making them interesting.
Roadblock is really not Dwayne Johnson, as he'd be more like Sgt. Slaughter, or Stalker, but okay he kind of grows on you as the lead, after the apparent demise of Duke, Tatum Channing, and most of the Joes in an ambush, similar to the one in the 1987 GI Joe movie and to the one in Resolute. Flint and Lady Jaye and Jinx appear to be the newer versions. This is okay. They got better actors this time to play people. Early on they take a page from the last movie where Zartan had become the President, using a disguise made with nanobot machines, and he manages to free Cobra Commander using Storm Shadow, but leaves Destro behind, and then Firefly and the other Cobra people plot to use the world's nuclear weapons against each other while making a demented series of super bombs that would later be used to destroy cities.
Snake Eyes is done better and no longer has that stupid mask from the first one, with the lips, and the other masks are better, like the Commander's.
Jonathan Pryce chews scenery as the fake president and the real one.
They even have Cobra HISS tanks! Nice.
It's a fun movie with an all star cast which even includes the oddity of General Joe Colton, Bruce Willis of all people, and it kind of works too.
Dont' bother with the 3D version because it's nuts neough as it is and will look confusing converted. Just see it in 2D.
Yo Joe!
Review by Adam Browne
Friday, March 29, 2013
Review: "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" doesn't deliver
"Seeing a Friend for the End of the World" R
This 2012 movie stars Steve Carell and Kiera Knightley as two lonely people that encounter an extremely terse situation, one might say the final situation, that an asteroid will soon obliterate humanity and they of all people must get together. Taking the premise of avoiding someone unless they were the last people on Earth, and being stuck with them, could at times have been funny. Certainly the irony works in their favor, and at the best of times, the little moments are done well. One scene involves the lonely guy letting a spider go in his sink, only to have it bite him all over his face before he awakens the next day. Also a whacked out old man decides to off himself via mobsters, but is all preachy beforehand. In another scene, a couple he yelled at abandons their little dog with a note saying 'Sorry' and he begins using the joke about 'Sorry' as a plot device. The quirky underdog story could have been Wes Anderson territory, but it's actually Lorene Scafaria (Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist), another underdog director. As a character bit it has a tone of delight if not outward humor, but it is in no way laugh out loud. The jokes are more ironic and sad than funny. The guy realizes he is mismatched with the girl who is 20 years younger, but they learn to like each other. The only real drawback is it could have reached a much larger audience being PG 13 rather than R. Normally I don't mind it if a movie is rater R, but sometimes it really isin't necessary. The subject matter in this film doesn't even warrant an R, except a few times they say the F word. Just cutting that out would have meant more people could have seen it. This is the antithesis of the movie "2012" were it written by a Prozac sufferer.
Review by Adam Browne
This 2012 movie stars Steve Carell and Kiera Knightley as two lonely people that encounter an extremely terse situation, one might say the final situation, that an asteroid will soon obliterate humanity and they of all people must get together. Taking the premise of avoiding someone unless they were the last people on Earth, and being stuck with them, could at times have been funny. Certainly the irony works in their favor, and at the best of times, the little moments are done well. One scene involves the lonely guy letting a spider go in his sink, only to have it bite him all over his face before he awakens the next day. Also a whacked out old man decides to off himself via mobsters, but is all preachy beforehand. In another scene, a couple he yelled at abandons their little dog with a note saying 'Sorry' and he begins using the joke about 'Sorry' as a plot device. The quirky underdog story could have been Wes Anderson territory, but it's actually Lorene Scafaria (Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist), another underdog director. As a character bit it has a tone of delight if not outward humor, but it is in no way laugh out loud. The jokes are more ironic and sad than funny. The guy realizes he is mismatched with the girl who is 20 years younger, but they learn to like each other. The only real drawback is it could have reached a much larger audience being PG 13 rather than R. Normally I don't mind it if a movie is rater R, but sometimes it really isin't necessary. The subject matter in this film doesn't even warrant an R, except a few times they say the F word. Just cutting that out would have meant more people could have seen it. This is the antithesis of the movie "2012" were it written by a Prozac sufferer.
Review by Adam Browne
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Review: "The Croods" is tired story but pretty
"The Croods" PG
The prehistoric modern family that is not the Flintstones is here, Dreamworks' cartoon spoof of all those old Ug/Finstones/Thundarr cartoons, or a possible rip off, the Croods. They have the typical brutish Neanderthal father figure, a sort of Fred Flintstone/Peter Griffin clone in animal skin cloth.The mother is identical to Lois from Family Guy or possibly any sassy mom type. The mother in law is basically any sassy old lady. The son is basically Bart and Bud Bundy and Fry from Futurama, or any teen male dweeb type. The daughter is like any sassy Disney princess of trhe past decade, and Guy is the smart know it all prince.
The family are cavemen living out a life of foraging for bird eggs and other stuff to eat, and then going back to their cave, but when one fateful hour the cave is destroyed in an earthquake, they must move to another place. Thankfully, the headstrong daughter has found Guy, modern man, who has fire and becomes a kind of male rival to the father. He is not at all like Bam Bam from the Flintstones. He is also similar to Bud Bundy, a smart know it all, or like Bart also in a way, and like the kid from Up, even though he was less resourceful.
The family and their new companion begin a trek through the strangest prehistoric Earth land forms ever, (for 3D) which includes flying piranha, a land whale that walks on legs, a saber toothed cat with green matted fur, and an eerie resemblance to Stimpy from Ren and Stimpy were he prehistoric, and various birds and mammoths. The big toothy characters are similar to those in Shark's Tale. That's not good. This is all forgiven since it's a fantasy and there is no way they intended to make it accurate, any more than those Ice Age movies. Some kind of doomsday messes up land forms rapidly so they have to keep moving, even though this would destroy everything and they'd have no food. The part where they chuck each other through the air and they land intact was ridiculous. Suggesting as the Guy character does, flying off a cliff is a good thing, it makes one wonder if he was trying to get rid of them, but then they fly off cliffs and nothing happens.
This movie was like many movies in concept, but it had some pretty visuals. It could be an odd rental.
Review by Adam Browne
The prehistoric modern family that is not the Flintstones is here, Dreamworks' cartoon spoof of all those old Ug/Finstones/Thundarr cartoons, or a possible rip off, the Croods. They have the typical brutish Neanderthal father figure, a sort of Fred Flintstone/Peter Griffin clone in animal skin cloth.The mother is identical to Lois from Family Guy or possibly any sassy mom type. The mother in law is basically any sassy old lady. The son is basically Bart and Bud Bundy and Fry from Futurama, or any teen male dweeb type. The daughter is like any sassy Disney princess of trhe past decade, and Guy is the smart know it all prince.
The family are cavemen living out a life of foraging for bird eggs and other stuff to eat, and then going back to their cave, but when one fateful hour the cave is destroyed in an earthquake, they must move to another place. Thankfully, the headstrong daughter has found Guy, modern man, who has fire and becomes a kind of male rival to the father. He is not at all like Bam Bam from the Flintstones. He is also similar to Bud Bundy, a smart know it all, or like Bart also in a way, and like the kid from Up, even though he was less resourceful.
The family and their new companion begin a trek through the strangest prehistoric Earth land forms ever, (for 3D) which includes flying piranha, a land whale that walks on legs, a saber toothed cat with green matted fur, and an eerie resemblance to Stimpy from Ren and Stimpy were he prehistoric, and various birds and mammoths. The big toothy characters are similar to those in Shark's Tale. That's not good. This is all forgiven since it's a fantasy and there is no way they intended to make it accurate, any more than those Ice Age movies. Some kind of doomsday messes up land forms rapidly so they have to keep moving, even though this would destroy everything and they'd have no food. The part where they chuck each other through the air and they land intact was ridiculous. Suggesting as the Guy character does, flying off a cliff is a good thing, it makes one wonder if he was trying to get rid of them, but then they fly off cliffs and nothing happens.
This movie was like many movies in concept, but it had some pretty visuals. It could be an odd rental.
Review by Adam Browne
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Review: "Oz The Great and Powerful" smells strong but not in a good way
"Oz The Great and Powerful" PG
Sam Raimi of the Evil Dead movies and Spider Man tackles the prequel to the Wizard of Oz, a timeless classic from 1939 that essentially established the technicolor musical fantasy genre. Really if any company was going to do another Oz movie it would have to be Peter Jackson and Weta with someone else like Del Toro helming for it to even work, but they got Disney and not Jackson or Del Toro. They also had to pay some rights to Columbia that still holds most of the trademarks and didn't let them use 'flying monkeys' or 'Dorothy'.
The plot is that it's 1905. The actor, Franco, can't really pull it off and his character is too young to be the man Dorothy will meet only 33 years later. Weizs and Klunis have fun playing dress up as witches, but Klunis is no green Wicked clone, not by a long shot. The circus scoundrel, Oz, is accidentally whisked to the magical kingdom by way of a hot air balloon in a tornado, where he encounters a land named for him in glorious color, and meets a smitten witch and her evil sister, who rule a castle of emerald called the Emerald City, which has yellow brick roads and goofy characters, and the guards a flying simians but not monkeys. The wicked sisters trick Oz into going on a quest to destroy their sibling, the white witch, who turns out to be good, and who convinces him to join her in a fight to reclaim the city, like something out of Lord of the Rings, only not nearly as cool, or Narnia, only a little less preachy.
The story has a lot of dazzle and it has a cute subplot about a living orphaned china doll marionette, but it is lacking in the greatness department and doesn't have the charm or the essence of the original. The books were a nod to an election, as was the movie, and the characters timeless because they were archetypes of people which audiences related to. In this movie you don't ever relate to Oz or the witches, or even really the humans at all. The bellman monkey and the china doll could have been a story, and they're CG and puppets, but the humans are just meh, not interesting, and you don't feel for them or their plight, a bit like the Alice and Wonderland sequel from a few years ago.
It's not that the movie is bad. The action and pacing are pretty nice, and it is a visually stunning thing, but there's no heart, like when the wicked witch turns. They should have made Oz less of an ass. They could have improved the story. It's like they just did it to cash in. It makes you appreciate and see the original again, which was a musical, even more.
Worth a rental but not a special edition bluray. The extras wouldn't really be interesting.
Review by Adam Browne
Sam Raimi of the Evil Dead movies and Spider Man tackles the prequel to the Wizard of Oz, a timeless classic from 1939 that essentially established the technicolor musical fantasy genre. Really if any company was going to do another Oz movie it would have to be Peter Jackson and Weta with someone else like Del Toro helming for it to even work, but they got Disney and not Jackson or Del Toro. They also had to pay some rights to Columbia that still holds most of the trademarks and didn't let them use 'flying monkeys' or 'Dorothy'.
The plot is that it's 1905. The actor, Franco, can't really pull it off and his character is too young to be the man Dorothy will meet only 33 years later. Weizs and Klunis have fun playing dress up as witches, but Klunis is no green Wicked clone, not by a long shot. The circus scoundrel, Oz, is accidentally whisked to the magical kingdom by way of a hot air balloon in a tornado, where he encounters a land named for him in glorious color, and meets a smitten witch and her evil sister, who rule a castle of emerald called the Emerald City, which has yellow brick roads and goofy characters, and the guards a flying simians but not monkeys. The wicked sisters trick Oz into going on a quest to destroy their sibling, the white witch, who turns out to be good, and who convinces him to join her in a fight to reclaim the city, like something out of Lord of the Rings, only not nearly as cool, or Narnia, only a little less preachy.
The story has a lot of dazzle and it has a cute subplot about a living orphaned china doll marionette, but it is lacking in the greatness department and doesn't have the charm or the essence of the original. The books were a nod to an election, as was the movie, and the characters timeless because they were archetypes of people which audiences related to. In this movie you don't ever relate to Oz or the witches, or even really the humans at all. The bellman monkey and the china doll could have been a story, and they're CG and puppets, but the humans are just meh, not interesting, and you don't feel for them or their plight, a bit like the Alice and Wonderland sequel from a few years ago.
It's not that the movie is bad. The action and pacing are pretty nice, and it is a visually stunning thing, but there's no heart, like when the wicked witch turns. They should have made Oz less of an ass. They could have improved the story. It's like they just did it to cash in. It makes you appreciate and see the original again, which was a musical, even more.
Worth a rental but not a special edition bluray. The extras wouldn't really be interesting.
Review by Adam Browne
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Review: "Jack the Giant Slayer" is giant loud fairytale
"Jack the Giant Killer" PG 13
Bryan Singer expands an old children's fable about Jack and The Beanstalk into a big loud action movie with CGI enhanced giants and a strange British world during the feudal age. Turning a simple short story into a big budget riff ala Lord of the Rings, just as was done for other recent fables, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Hanzel and Gretel, Beastly, Mirror Mirror, etc, (not reviewed), Hollywood's attempt to modernize these things into ridiculous showpieces for modern children is kind of silly. Jack and the Beanstalk would have be en better as an animated movie by Disney. Live action just doesn't cut it. The actors don't seem too comfortable as acting against green screens and special effects must be hard. The A list actor cameos are interesting in that the actors probably didn't know what they were getting into. It's not a horrible movie but ist is dumb and loud. If you like watching people running and ducking giants swinging clubs or a war between a castle and giants, it's all there. The FX were not done by ILM or Weta. It was Digital Domain. They also had a 3D version so a lot of the gags are for 3D.
Popcorn rental material.
But what I always wondered, even as a child and the original story, is how the heck the Giants realm could float in the clouds if it clearly was so heavy, with all thous giants. It did not have anti gravity and did not appear to be a space vessel of any kind in the film. Ha. I guess I think too literally sometimes.
Oh and look for the groan causing gags in the film. Yawn.
Review by Adam Browne
Bryan Singer expands an old children's fable about Jack and The Beanstalk into a big loud action movie with CGI enhanced giants and a strange British world during the feudal age. Turning a simple short story into a big budget riff ala Lord of the Rings, just as was done for other recent fables, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Hanzel and Gretel, Beastly, Mirror Mirror, etc, (not reviewed), Hollywood's attempt to modernize these things into ridiculous showpieces for modern children is kind of silly. Jack and the Beanstalk would have be en better as an animated movie by Disney. Live action just doesn't cut it. The actors don't seem too comfortable as acting against green screens and special effects must be hard. The A list actor cameos are interesting in that the actors probably didn't know what they were getting into. It's not a horrible movie but ist is dumb and loud. If you like watching people running and ducking giants swinging clubs or a war between a castle and giants, it's all there. The FX were not done by ILM or Weta. It was Digital Domain. They also had a 3D version so a lot of the gags are for 3D.
Popcorn rental material.
But what I always wondered, even as a child and the original story, is how the heck the Giants realm could float in the clouds if it clearly was so heavy, with all thous giants. It did not have anti gravity and did not appear to be a space vessel of any kind in the film. Ha. I guess I think too literally sometimes.
Oh and look for the groan causing gags in the film. Yawn.
Review by Adam Browne
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