Nov 11 2007

Knocked Up

Category: 2007,Movies,Reviews — velveetahead @ 3:48 am

Knocked Up

Directed: Judd Apatow
Starring: Katherine Heigl, Seth Rogen

After a one-night stand a pretty girl finds out she is pregnant with an average guy’s kid and she isn’t sure how she feels about it.

I love Judd Apatow. I was a fan of Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He is excellent at capturing the awkwardness of dorks, nerds and slackers without making them into stereotypes. While hearing that Katherine Heigl’s character (Alison) slept with Seth Rogen’s character (Ben) is not believeable, seeing how it plays out at the bar where she’s been drinking and he makes her laugh ends up with them falling into bed.

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Nov 11 2007

Night Watch

Category: 2005,Books,Movies,Reviews — velveetahead @ 1:20 am

Night Watch

Directed: Timur Bekmambetov
Starring: Vladimir Menshov, Konstantin Khabensky

Others are beings with supernatural powers and there has been a truce between the light and dark side until now.

I read the book just before watching the movie. It is the first book in a trilogy. The book follows Anton as a worker in Night Watch, which is actually the good guys watching all the dark ones to make sure they obey the rules. The Day Watch makes sure that the light ones obey the rules too. They have to keep a balance between the two of them or the world will go all crazy. A dark magician has put a hex on a woman, and Anton is sent in to help remove it. He ends up falling in love with her since he’s an inexperienced agent after being  recently promoted to the field from being an analyst. He feels more comfortable crunching numbers and makes tons of mistakes while fumbling through things.

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Nov 10 2007

Over the Hedge

Category: 2006,Movies,Reviews — velveetahead @ 3:45 am

Over the Hedge

Directed: Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick
Starring: Bruce Willis, Steve Carell, Garry Shandling, William Shatner, Thomas Hayden Church

Adaptation from the comic strip about a group of wild animals trying to make due to an encroaching suburb by stealing the food.

It’s a goofy movie, but one to watch with kids that won’t make adults go insane. I didn’t read the comic strip enough to know how well it translated over. I did enjoy the completely spazzy squirrel, especially when he was given sugar for a secret mission. My other favorite scene was when the baby hedgehogs were driving a car like it was a racing game. It does have good moral story about not stealing from your friends and working together to get things done.

Rating: B

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Nov 10 2007

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Category: 2007,Books,Movies,Reviews — velveetahead @ 2:39 am

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Directed: David Yates
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson

Harry is in his fifth year at Hogwarts, no one believes Harry’s story about Voldemort’s return. The Magic of Ministry isn’t helping things by trying to keep it all under wraps.

This was my favorite book. I was worried about how everything that was crammed into the hugest book in the series was going to make it into the movie. What I loved in the book that Harry was a complete ass. I loved that J.K. Rowling made a beloved character act like a true teenager. He was so angry at being kept in the dark all summer long while Ron and Hermoine knew what was going on, and would lash out at them all year long. I loved his irrational anger at them both becoming prefects while he wasn’t chosen. He was angry that Dumbledore had kept him in the dark about the Order and the increase in Voldemort’s activity, and really upset that he wouldn’t look him in the eye. That anger didn’t come through in the movie as intense as it came up in the book. It was there slightly in bursts, but it doesn’t last long. I can understand how it was calmed down a bit since it would make the movie really long and not have a lot of action if we were just lost in Harry’s thoughts.

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Nov 10 2007

1408

Category: 2007,Movies,Reviews — velveetahead @ 1:09 am

1408

Directed: Mikael Hafstrom
Starring: John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Mary McCormack

After hunting for any signs of paranormal activity from the other side, a grieving father declares there are no such things as ghosts. Then he gets trapped in room 1408 where no one has survived past an hour in the room.

I haven’t read the Stephen King story so I have no idea how well of an adaptation this movie is. It is a pretty creepy movie for a while when he finally gets to the hotel run by Samuel L. Jackson, who is awesome. The hotel room is very spooky and watching a non-believer slowly believing what is happening to him is pretty fun. There is an odd part in the middle, where Cusack’s character yells at a tiny Jackson in his fridge. It is a hilarious scene, but really breaks the spooky mood.

Then there is a part where you think the movie is over, and I was pissed that was the way it was going to end. Then it is just a fake out and it isn’t really over. I was glad, and the way it ended was better but still not great.

Rating: B-

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Nov 09 2007

Movies Opening Nov 9

Category: 2007,Movies,Opening — velveetahead @ 1:15 am

Nationwide Releases

Lions for Lambs
Directed: Robert Redford
Starring: Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep
Trailer

Synopsis: Two soldiers get caught in a battle in Afghanistan, while a professor who knew them tries to get an apathetic college kid riled up about the war. A senator wants a reporter to write a story on the war to help his bid for presidency.

My Take: Half of it seems interesting, and it would be the half without Tom Cruise.

RT Score: 27%
RT Consensus: Despite its powerhouse cast, Lions for Lambs feels like a disjointed series of lectures, rather than a sharp narrative, and ends up falling flat.

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Nov 08 2007

The Black Dahlia

Category: 2006,Movies,Reviews — velveetahead @ 2:57 am

The Black Dahlia

Directed: Brian De Palma
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, Mia Kirshner

Two detectives try to solve a gruesome murder in 1947 L.A.

While I was hoping for an intriguing, film noir murder mystery with femme fatales, what I got instead was a sleazy mess. I’ve never been a Josh Hartnett fan and this movie didn’t help that opinion. He was as boring as usual, especially in his voice overs. He didn’t have chemistry with either Scarlett Johansson or Hilary Swank’s characters. Scarlett Johansson was just weird in the movie. She was playing the two detectives off each other, but she didn’t seem to actually like either one very much.

Mia Kirshner plays the dead girl who should be the main plot of the story, but it almost seems like an afterthought. So much time is spent on Harnett’s detective investigating Hilary Swank and her family, supposedly for the case, but there is so much other icky stuff going on with that family that the murder was just an afterthought. When everything comes to light, the reasons why Mia’s character died, are so dumb and make no sense. It just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Rating: C

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Nov 08 2007

Hollywoodland

Category: 2006,Movies,Reviews — velveetahead @ 1:39 am

Hollywoodland

Directed: Allen Culter
Starring: Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Ben Affleck, Bob Hoskins

Based on the true story of the unsolved death of TV’s Superman, George Reeves. Was it suicide or murder?

This movie was slow and that might have worked if there was some payoff at the end, but there isn’t since no one is really sure if George Reeves killed himself, if he was murdered or if it was an accident. A whole bunch of different scenarios are shown, and they are the only interesting part of the movie.

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Nov 07 2007

Babel

Category: 2006,Movies,Reviews — velveetahead @ 2:23 am

Babel

Directed: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Gael Garcia Bernal, Adriana Barraza, Rinko Kikuchi

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are vacationing in Morocco when she is shot accidentally by two boys. Their Mexican nanny back home is trying to get to her son’s wedding when this happens so she tries to take their two kids across the border illegally. And somehow a Japanese teen dealing with her father being wanted by the Tokyo police is related to these stories.

The “big” story would be the one involving Cate Blanchett’s character getting shot from a stray bullet and Brad Pitt trying to get her help in Morocco where he has difficulty communicating with people in a strange land. There is the point made that the Americans try to spin the story that it is a terrorist act against American tourists, which it isn’t, but there isn’t much time spent on that angle. There was so much of this story spent with Brad Pitt fretting over help getting to his wife in the middle of the nowhere while Cate Blanchett slowly bleeds in a remote village. Their story is pretty boring.

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Nov 07 2007

The Bourne Ultimatum

Category: 2007,Movies,Reviews — velveetahead @ 1:58 am

The Bourne Ultimatum

Directed: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, Joan Allen, David Strathairn

Jason Bourne remembers even more about his past, and comes home to find the first guy who trained him while the government is still after him.

The main plot point of the movie was Jason Bourne discovering who he really is and what really happened to him, but at this point, I don’t even care. Once I found out, I was thinking, “Whatever, let’s get back to the action!” I love these movies. I love the action sequences. They are insane. They keep me riveted when action scenes in other movies bore me. The first movie, which I thought was pretty nifty, but only okay was directed by someone else. I came to love these movies with the second one, which has the same director as this movie.

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