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jcv2
Reviews
Big Hero 6 (2014)
Should have been rated G...
... because only a kid less than ten years old would enjoy this movie. And this movie is proof that Academy Award voters often don't watch the movies they vote for.
The movie is riddled with clichés almost from the beginning. When the brother is running into the burning building you see his hat fly off and conveniently land in front of Hiro. When I saw that, and before I knew what was going to happen had actually happened, I asked myself if I really cared at that point if he died? The answer was no because like every other character in this movie, they're all carbon copies of one another. There's nothing about them that makes you care.
So after seeing that cliché dropped at my feet, I knew this was going to be bad. And it was.
The main character makes absolutely no sense when you stop to think about it. He graduates from high school at 13 and creates a small robot that every non-genius can't create in a lifetime. Somehow, despite this massive intellect, he seems to have flown completely under the academic radar throughout his shortened jaunt through school because he has received what appears to be no job offers to top flight companies, no scholarships to top universities, nor any of the other trappings that intellectual prowess over your peers provides. His mother only gently urges him to make more of himself and treats him as a pet, basically.
As a result, he seems to have become completely devoid of any ambition after graduation other than to use his amazing robot to become the nerd equivalent of a pool shark. Even less-than-geniuses realize that stealing money from people who have much less concern for the law than you is not a way to make a living.
With just a little brainstorming and a single trip to a robot shot he devises an even more spectacular robot that has a hive mentality, something I can safely say nobody, not even in his cartoon universe, has ever achieved, especially to the degree he has. If that's all it takes to get him going, the obvious question is "is he a shut-in?" I mean, does he ever go outside? Did he not realize such things existed before?
After the scene where the robot was basically acting drunk, I fell asleep. I admit I didn't watch the rest of it until I woke up and he was, I don't know, going crazy and trying to get the robot to kill someone and everyone was of course trying to talk him out of it. Who didn't see that coming? That was the Academy Award moment there, and I almost missed it. Phew! /s
Glad I rented this rather than buying it. I was tempted to just outright buy it because I usually love computer animated films, but something didn't seem right about this one. It had a high rating on basically every review site but when I watched the trailer I wasn't impressed at all. Even the trailer was a cliché. And hey, I was right, it wasn't funny in the least. I didn't laugh even once.
The characters are all one-dimensional. They're all carbon copies of each other which makes them all basically just props that you can have no emotional investment in. The bad guy is obviously bad and there is no subtlety to his character at all. Oh and of course one of them is black.
Their parents are dead? Why? It isn't explained. Are we supposed to feel more attached to a character just because he's an orphan? Puh-leez. What Disney-fied pandering nonsense.
It wasn't until after I'd lost interest that I went back and looked at how this was different than the other animated features I liked, and there it was. This wasn't made by Pixar or Dreamworks, no, it was made directly by Disney. The same company that ran out of ideas decades ago and started cranking out carbon copy films. The same computer animation studio that made the other animated feature you have to be ten to enjoy: Frozen. I'm just amazed there's no singing in this one.
Note to self: don't watch anymore movies made by Disney. Buy the stock, not the films.
Manhattan (2014)
Horrible mess
I began watching this series with the hope that it would be technically and/or scientifically interesting to see how the world's first atomic bomb was developed. Instead I watched with each passing episode how it was slowly devolving into what is basically an over-the-top Spanish soap opera with very little science involved. And now, by the thirteenth episode, it's pretty much jumped the shark.
Where to begin? Hard to say, there are so many places this farce just got everything wrong.
The biggest part they got wrong was the faux hostility that the gun vs. implosion teams have for one another. Yes, there was competition, but like Feynman says "nature cannot be fooled". So, they admitted to themselves that rather than put all their energies into one idea that in the end might have an insurmountable problem attached to it (which the gun method did), they should explore other ideas just in case the other idea doesn't work out. They certainly weren't going to lie or steal resources from the other to do that. Nor were they going threaten to kill members of the opposing team. No, they openly agreed to try multiple approaches. Oppenheimer wasn't hell-bent on the gun method working, he was open to whatever might work because nobody really knew back then what would actually work and what wouldn't without exploring those ideas first. Roosevelt and Truman didn't give a damn which method was being used so long as it worked.
Which brings me to the portrayal of Oppenheimer. Who in the world decided to play him as a brooding, anti-social, stuck up, unpersonable, autistic-type person? He didn't single-handedly build the bomb through his gargantuan intellect, he brought together the greatest minds of the time to do it for him. He was bright but was also good at bringing hugely talented people together. In order to bring people like that together you have to be a person that gets along fairly well with other scientists. The Oppenheimer in this film, however, treats his fellow scientists like they're common peasants, like they should feel lucky to even be able to talk to him. What a bunch of nonsense. You don't achieve the levels of professionalism that he did in his field by being that way. You're not going to get good ideas out of people by ridiculing them.
The writers treated the idea of compartmentalization as though violating it amounted to a death sentence for those who violated it, when in reality nobody really gave a flip because you can't get science done that way and they knew it. It was impossible to develop the bomb in the time they had if scientists were not freely allowed to discuss their work with other scientists. Oppenheimer got that dead right and even explained to Groves why it wouldn't work. It's why they brought them all to Los Alamos and put them all within the same fence in the first place, so they could at least control them a little bit that way. This movie got it dead wrong. The scientists rebelled at being compartmentalized and the brass knew they'd be up a creek if they started trying to silence them because all the scientists were in agreement.
By now the series has grown men with PhDs in physics, men at the tops of their field basically lying to one another at every opportunity with the intention that if they keep lying, their ideas will eventually work. People like that don't get invited en masse to projects like this. People like that put out press releases for cold fusion and get called out on it when other scientists notice it has holes in it. If there was a problem with the gun method, there wouldn't be just one or two people that knew it wouldn't work. EVERYONE would have known because they were all freely talking to one another about it. The people who built the bomb didn't covet the idea to the extent that it would destroy their careers to follow it any further and certainly didn't kill themselves over being chosen to investigate a method that turned out to not work.
And, of course, since this is an American film, there are various subplots of this person sleeping with that person which is what you get when you know you have nothing else to say. There is so much fluff in this film that seems designed simply to fill space because nothing interesting is actually going on. The subplots of infidelity, of conspiracy, of treason, of homosexuality, ad nauseam.
Go watch Oppenheimer (1980). I couldn't find anywhere I could stream it online so I just bought the DVDs from Amazon. Much more interesting series without all the soap opera drama that plagues Manhattan. Oppenheimer goes into exquisite details explaining things at some points and the geek in me just loves it.
Prometheus (2012)
Ridley's lost it
Questions, questions, questions. There's plenty of spoilers here. You've been warned.
1) The drawings. Ancient civilizations made them, and at best they were a rough guess of what was seen hours or even days earlier. You expect us to believe that they got the positioning so spot on that in a galaxy of 200 billion stars that we were able to find the exact one they were pointing to based on five stars?
2) Why was Guy Pearce cast as the old man? Aren't there any old men still acting in Hollywood these days that could have played the part more convincingly? Perhaps this was some tie-in to the 2001 old man scene since the makeup job was done about as well (read: awful makeup job).
3) The ship's engines are firing full blast through the emptiness of space. Kubrick got it right in 2001, now Ridley comes and gets it wrong again. Basic Physics 101: a body in motion tends to stay in motion until it is acted upon by an outside force. There are no appreciable forces acting against your ship, so the ship doesn't slow down even when the engines are off. You're just burning up fuel pushing against a force that isn't there.
4) So in a whole five years time they went from seeing drawings on the wall of a cave on Earth to convincing the right people that "this means something" to building this ship to traveling who knows how far across the galaxy (because that wasn't explained either) to ending up at their destination? Have they figured faster-than-light travel in less than 100 years from now? Then they pop through the atmosphere at the exact spot they need to be at?
5) Why did they spend all this money to send what amounts to a ship full of misfits, jerks, and nitwits to make contact with an alien civilization? Really, these were the best candidates they had? Charlie is as a grade-A jerk who goes out of his way to insult David at every opportunity. The 'geologist' looks more like a maladjusted skinhead than someone you'd expect to have a PhD under his belt if he managed to get a ticket on this ship. His cohort that follows him acts like he was dropped on his head as an infant.
6) Father? Really? That was just plain pointless. Served no purpose at all.
7) If you see an interstellar cobra with a full set of working teeth rear its head at you in a place you have no idea how something is even alive in, do you a) stay away from it until you know what it is, b) talk and coo after it like it's a pet and try and touch it several times despite repeated threats, or c) put your helmet back on and get the heck out of there? Our engineers picked the wrong answer. I mean whose train of thought would be "aww maybe it's friendly" when something pops it head up out of a pool of black slime? Do creatures that survive in almost impossibly hostile environments like this tend to be friendly?
8) You're on another planet in a dark, dank, cavernous place. Just outside of this place the atmosphere is toxic. So what do you do? You take your helmet off of course. Who needs those, right? Helmets are for nerds! If the air smells OK, it must be OK. Airborne diseases? Atomized ancient alien body parts? What could possibly happen? All that matters is that it's breathable.
Overall this movie is a whole lot of turkey. It does have its moments, though, like the star map scene that, I'm guessing, shows a map of all the planets they've brought life to. That was done beautifully. The get-this-thing-out-of-me scene had me squirming in my seat, but then later when you see how humongous that thing has become, the obvious question is "what has it been eating in there to go from the size of a chihuahua to the size of a water buffalo"? The answer is "nothing".
There are too many people in this movie! You could get rid of half the cast and they wouldn't be missed. Why did there need to be a captain AND whomever Charlize Theron was supposed to be? Why couldn't she have been the captain?
This is definitely a prequel to Alien, but Alien made MUCH more sense than this movie.
Drive (2011)
Different, but not great
If Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction had a kid, this would be the result. Except while each of those was different and great in its own way, this one is not. It's different, but not great.
I walked out of this movie feeling like I'd just been punk'd by a bunch of fake reviews in this very site. But no, RT loves it, too.
Ryan Gossling plays a mysterious, very quiet person who, somehow, despite not showing any outward charm, any kind of personality, or anything like that which a woman might look for in a member of the opposite sex, manages to woo his neighbor next door, Irene, who, oh, just happens to still be married to a soon-to-be ex-con with debts plus interest due upon release.
Carey Mulligan plays his love interest, your typical movie damsel who enters a man's life with the intent of making it better but ends up doing the opposite. I don't discredit her acting here, though, she was one of the two people in this movie that gave a believable performance, the other being Bryan Cranston.
Everyone else was basically awful. Albert Brooks didn't even try to get into character. He has the personality of a used car salesman, but we're to believe he's a crime boss? Ron Perlman was an overacting ham. Christina Hendricks was her usual eye candy self who can't act and can't cry on cue, apparently.
But the on screen chemistry between Gossling and Mulligan is not believable at all. How could a woman fall for a person who has the personality of a tree?
That and the what seems to be total deafness of basically every off-camera person in this movie makes me wonder how much suspension of disbelief the director expects us to have. Despite gun battles being waged in apartment buildings with the front door wide open, despite the survivor standing there for several minutes, nobody comes along and asks "what the hey just happened here, and who are you?"
The fun parts of the movie are when Gossling unleashes his inner Bourne, but those are few and far between, too few and too far to keep the movie interesting.
In short this movie is pretty boring and tedious to watch except for small parts, the situations are implausible, the casting choices leave much to be desired, and the director seems to have demanded very little of those casting choices because that's exactly what they gave.
It shouldn't be called "Drive" it should be called "Park" or "Stuck".
Wanted (2008)
Thought it was a commercial at first...
Saw this by mistake in the theaters awhile back.
The ticket taker led me to the wrong theater, can't remember what I actually came to see, but I sat down and the usual commercials started playing. Then this thing came on and I thought 'hope this is the last one and the movie will start.'
Well, it turned into the longest commercial I ever remember seeing at the theater. I kept thinking "wow, they're really stretching the limits on what they think we'll tolerate on commercials these days".
So 15 minutes into it and I'm thinking what in the world... is this commercial ever going to end? As far as commercials go I'd pretty much had it, it looked another horrible Angelina Jolie I'm-such-a-badass movie, and made a mental note not to ever see this piece of garbage.
Then *ding* it finally dawned on me that I wasn't watching a commercial, I was actually in the wrong theater. Nonchalantly got up and walked out, got in the car, went home.
War of the Worlds (2005)
Meanders everywhere!
Having never seen the original, my point of view is going to be based on the movie itself, not its history. And my negative review is in no way tarnished by Cruise's strange behavior. Cruise and Jacko are probably brothers separated at birth but don't know it, but that's another issue.
I'm not sure who's to blame for this movie. Perhaps Spielberg had too many yes-men around him (or yes-women, let's be inclusive here). Perhaps the original WOTW is a lot like this and Spielberg liked it so much, this was meant to be his tribute. Whatever. This one stinks. Tributes shouldn't stink.
This movie had potential (and lotsa hype) but was utterly ruined by the "I'm-a-bad-father" subplot that the movie kept diverting to all throughout the film. Spielberg poured on the syrup at these points and it really did make me roll my eyes after awhile. The scene on the hill where the brother, for reasons that were not at all explained, just -had- to see what was going on on the other side of the hill actually made me squirm. His line about "if you love me you'll let me go" was straight out of the cornfields. Awful.
Dakota did a decent job but this certainly pales in comparison to other movies I've seen her in, like Man on Fire. As usual, Dakota and her brother play the smart-ass kids to the inept father. Never seen that before, have we Steve? Turn on the TV and there's hundreds of shows with characters like that already on.
Don't get me started on the basement scene. Completely unnecessary and went on WAY too long. The bit with the proboscis was just completely silly. Spielberg's version of horror/suspense I guess. One minute the aliens are out there tilling up the earth on a global scale with a horrific ferocity, the next minute they send this little wormy proboscis thing down into the basement to ever-so-gently poke around. Ooh, be careful, don't touch anything! Not to mention Farmer Ted thinking he's going to kill these things with a SHOTGUN of all things. Tim Robbins never could do scenes well with high levels of emotion, and he does it again here. Anytime he has to show intense emotion, the corners of his mouth curl down in a frown and that's as far as it goes. Like clockwork.
When the ship starts to come out of the ground, and even after it has come completely out of the ground, the people around it largely stay in the same spot and are STANDING THERE STARING AT IT. A three-legged behemoth... just came out of the ground from nowhere... 200+ feet tall with arms for days... and these geniuses are standing around waiting to see what it will do next? Only when it starts putting the smack down on everyone do they seem to give up any hope that it's E.T. and start to run away. Did they expect some sort of welcoming party instead?
The idea that thousands of those things, as huge as they are, could lie dormant under the ground without being detected. To accept that you would have to perform far more than suspension of disbelief and go straight for the alternate universe explanation. Pure laziness if you ask me, like Spielberg didn't give a damn about providing a plausible background for these creatures.
Lots and lots of little events that dead-end into nowhere. The friends who miss the boat. Who are they? Why should we care that they didn't make it? The reporters who are scrounging around for scraps of food as though they haven't eaten in weeks when the aliens just showed up LESS THAN A DAY AGO. We care that her sidekick is deaf why? The airplane. Why is it such a huge deal that one has crashed? Their minivan must have a protective shield of its own because the neighborhood-razing plane didn't put a scratch on their getaway car. Oh look! There's a neat little path for them to drive the minivan out of this mess.
For a bunch of alien invaders, talk about poor planning.... They sent waves of tripods to select locations and no ships to other locations, thereby offering people a place to run away to. And if they've "been watching us" for so long, wouldn't they have figured out beforehand that there are things on our planet that will kill them? Apparently not. They're smart enough to build these monstrous craft, smart enough to figure out how to navigate interstellar distances with these craft, but not smart enough to make said craft airtight or build leak-free suits (or any suits for that matter) in case there's some icky bugs that might kill them? Brilliant!
Ah anyway, I'd like my money back please. What a stinker! Spielberg blew it with this one by once again making the meat and potatoes of the film take a back seat to some sort of dysfunctional family crisis resolution. If Cruise had been the only main character, if his character had been more of a hero-type, if they'd thrown out the whole family bit, this would've been a lot better. But they didn't.
Did Spielberg just give up on this movie at one point and say to hell with it, this movie's too far gone to achieve redemption? It certainly looks that way. This film doesn't even look like a finished product. This looks like a whole bunch of plots thrown together before a good editor comes along and puts together a cohesive film.
A Boy's Life (2003)
Not for the faint of heart.
When I first started to watch this, I thought both the mother and the grandmother were no good, poor white trash and that the mother should be sterilized. Both seemed to be somewhat unstable mentally. The boy, too, seemed equally hopeless. As the movie progressed, my perception began to change and I began to see who was the real problem in this relationship.
Luckily, the social workers and teachers saw who the problem was as well. They actually have hope that Robert could turn out to be a normal little boy. Looking at him as they said this, you'd think they were saying this because they had to. However....
Kudos to the people who made this film who somehow were able to find these people and film their lives at such a turning point.
Chik yeung tin si (2002)
So awful you mean
Wow. I'm glad I rented this from Netflix before buying it because this movie is absolutely awful.
Is this what passes for entertainment in Hong Kong? Wall-to-wall action for strictly action's sake? Titillation for the sake of titillation, even though it has nothing to do with the plot and serves as nothing more than pure eye candy? People repeatedly getting misty-eyed over memories that seem so awfully contrived it makes you squirm in your seat to see people act this way?
I guess in Hong Kong they like flicks where people do over-the-top superhuman feats like we see in abundance in this movie, but it's pure hokey in my opinion. The plot of the movie quickly becomes a device whereby the director can show you all the sorts of gee-whiz moments he can think of.
This is the first movie I can remember not having the stomach to sit through since "Moving Violations", and that was close to 20 years ago.
3/10 stars.