VH Corner

Tom Cruise is back with the third installment directed and written by J.J. Abrams (Alias and Lost) and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Keri Russell.

If this movie wasn’t directed by J.J. Abrams, I wouldn’t have wanted to watch it. I loved the first movie when it came out. It was a good summer blockbuster thriller. The second movie was really stupid and to me seemed like I was watching Ronin. It was the same plot. Tom Cruise also freaks me out now, but I had to watch it because of Abrams. I am really glad I did.

This movie was tons of fun to watch. It was like watching the first one again. It had a plot, conspiracies, cool gadgets and crazy fighting. I loved them scaling walls to break into super secret places, hiding from cameras and posing a priests. There is also super crazy falling down the sides of high rises head first while shooting at bad guys that made me go “oooh!” when it happened. A lot of it reminded me of watching Alias, with the fighting and gadgets.

When I saw the trailers, I didn’t think I would believe Philip Seymour Hoffman as a bad guy. He sounds like a dork in the previews, but he is believable in the movie.

The guy from Shaun of the Dead was a tech guy who was the equivalent of Marshall from Alias. He was funny and it made the movie have some lighter moments instead of all of it being super intense Tom Cruise moments.

Speaking of being intense, Tom Cruise really likes to do his own stunts. There was one scene, that is shown in the trailers, where an explosion blows him up against the car. It looked like it really happened and it looked like it hurt a lot. There is another scene where he has to run 3/4 mile down the road. We watch him run the entire time. That’s a lot of running! He does make super goofy faces when he runs. That made me laugh.

I read reviews where the movie didn’t have a plot, but I thought it did. I don’t want to give too much away, but I thought it was pretty decent. There was a decent plot, lots of cool fights, good gadgets, great break-ins, and a little bit of humor.

Grade: B+

Claire Danes is lonely when she meets bumbling Jason Schwartzman and starts to date him. She is then wooed with more wit and style by Steve Martin.

I watched this movie in Dallas since I was trying to pick a movie that I didn’t think Jer would want to watch. I think I did a good job since Jer will not want to watch this movie, ever. It was very odd.

Steve Martin wrote the story that the movie is based on and it seems kinda icky that he is starring in it as an older suave guy hitting on Claire Danes. I found that to be distracting.

The movie starts out with him doing a voice over, but not as his character. He was narrating from his book, which was the first odd thing to happen. First, why not have someone else narrate that isn’t in the movie since you aren’t speaking as your character? Second, the narration was pointless. It tells you that Claire Danes character just moved to L.A. from the Midwest and is lonely. You can tell that already by what they have shown you. She looks bored at work, goes home, works on some art, eats dinner, takes some antidepressants and goes to bed. Thankfully, the narration stopped there for a really long time.

She meets Jason Schwartzman who is the biggest loser in the world. He annoyed me greatly since he was socially retarded. He disappears for a good part of the movie from her life, even though the audience gets to see what he is up to. She meets Steve Martin during this period. Their relationship is just there. I really didn’t care if she stayed with him or not. I didn’t see what she saw in him other than he bought her presents all the time. Jason Schwartzman’s character improves greatly and I actually liked him at the end of the movie.

I liked the way it ended since it seemed to have finally found a point after meandering around for a while, seemingly wasting time. Then the voice over narration started again! Once again, it told us things that we already knew. Soooo pointless. I really hate narration that is redundant.

Grade: C

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are secret assassins that are keeping their secret jobs from one another until they both are hired for the same job.

I knew this would be a fluff movie. It was, but the chemistry between Brad and Angelina actually came through, which doesn’t always happen with real-life couples in movies. I had forgotten how funny Brad Pitt could be. That reminded me that I really liked him in movies like True Romance where he is the stoner with the honey bear bong. He should be in more comedies.

I believed that Angelina could actually beat the crap out of anyone as an assassin. Brad wasn’t less believeable but passed. There was tons and tons of fighting, which I found to be boring after a while. I did like it when they were yelling and fighting with one another. I also loved the scene where they were driving in the mini van fighting bad guys. I enjoyed the bad guy flying through the mini van from one side open door through the other side open door. That was a good trick.

Grade: C+

Will Smith plays a little fish who everyone thinks is a shark slayer, but the shark is really his friend who isn’t interested in eating fish so helps his buddy get a big reputation. Can he keep the secret?

Jer and I watched this on cable a while back. It was starting when we sat down so we thought we’d check it out. I really had no big desire to see the movie before that point.

I thought it started out pretty corny with all the underwater/fish gags of stores and other city bits. That was over pretty soon though. Will Smith was goofy, but likeable as the main fish kid. I loved the shark that was a vegetarian. He was funny. Angelina Jolie was the sexy fish, but I found her to be disturbing. I think they tried too hard to make her fish look human with the hair and stuff. It just looked too odd.

The storyline was predictable, but it seemed like a cute kid movie. It wasn’t as funny as Shrek or Toy Story, but it wasn’t super annoying.

Grade: C

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are divorce mediators who spend their summers crashing weddings to hook up with chicks and score free drinks.

On the surface, this sounds exactly like the kind of movie that I would enjoy. I mean, it has crazy Vince Vaughn, Christoper Walken, the foxy Rachel McAdams, some sporadic nudity, and the potential for some very obscene material. However, I was very disappointed with the film. I just flat out didn’t think it was very funny. There are some funny parts, but overall, I didn’t laugh all that much. I thought the pace was very similar to Meet The Parents, which I also did not think was very good.

There was a lot of press about how R-rated comedies are making a comeback and blah blah blah. It just seems to me that the target audience for this movie was someone much older than me…unlike The 40 Year Old Virgin which I really really liked.

Sticking with the Nutflix scoring system, I gave this baby two stars.