Reviews

I got tired of the Fat Amy jokes real quick in the first two flicks, so I had low expectations going into this one. Can't anybody figure out what to do with Rebel Wilson's talent instead of relying on her weight as a, well, "fallback" strategy ? Finally, at lest they tried to get beyond the Fat Girl jokes and physical "humor." There's less music, but more "substance" to the plot. Silly, yes, but a plot nonetheless, that has nothing to do with music competitions. And when the Bellas are facing Certain Death, it's Fat Amy that comes to the rescue, and in a way that makes her weight an advantage instead of a handicap. I do wish there'd'a been more music, but at least there was less Fat Girl nonsense.

As I sat through this fiasco, it kept nagging me that I've seen this sort of thing before, but I couldn't recall what movie. Then it dawned on me, it wasn't in a movie theater, it was the kind of action junk they showed on Saturday morning television when I was a kid. If only Power Rangers had shown up to salvage this mess. Nerd's science fair project touches on the borders of all known laws of physics. Nerd goes on to college where, surprise, his work completes a super-secret project the government's NASA/CIA/Area 51 scientists couldn't quite figure out. OK, this works for a comic book. For a movie, at some point the nerd needs to become an adult. That's where they dropped the ball on this one. The Reed Richards character was so miscast, it wasn't even funny. You know, how some movies are bad enough that you laugh at how bad they are? This casting choice was beyond bad. The "parallel dimension" planet looked like a bad imitation of Vulcan, out of Star Trek. Or a bunch of those mashed-potato mountains Richard Dreyfuss carved during dinner in Closer Encounters, with phosphorescent glow-in-the-dark gravy being poured over them. At one point, I swear I could see sunshine coming through the windows of the building where they shot the studio/set action scenes "on the planet surface,", before going to post-production computer animation graphics. I couldn't quite make out the wires Sue Storm was hanging from in her airborne sequences, but I swear that's how they did it, it just looks so freakin' cheap. Like the old Peter Pan show starring Mary Martin, you know - - - just pretend you don't see what you're lookin' at. The inter-dimensional travel modules were simply upsized versions of a Ronco kitchen gadget, you know, like they used to advertise on those Saturday afternoon infomercials? ("Snaffles humans into any size dimension, alternate universe, or the building next door ... and it really, really works!!!"...if only it could have sliced and diced this script...) The Human Torch is a black guy? What?? The Thing actor did a creditable job of playing a live boulder. OK, let me re-read that last sentence.....Did I really write that? A guy playing a big boulder does the best acting in this flick. Hmmm, nope. Kudos to the guy playing Thing for his spot-on portrayal of live rocks. OK, you can't say that in any way that comes out serious. Hey, I tried. There is simply no positive thing to say about this movie.

Wall-to-wall "adult" comedy, featuring liberal use of foul language (mainly by the kids, of course), sexual references, and filth. And Dad is a moron, of course. He decides to take the family on a trip to Walley World, like when he was a kid, instead of their usual summer-at-the-cabin getaway. Along the way, they discover Mom was a tramp at college. A visit to Mom's sister and her husband brings on a series of graphic sexual jokes and a sight-gag or two There are some talented actors in this flick who could have done something with a script, if only somebody had prepared one. The car has the best punch lines.

I didn't like the way they turned Mr. Phelps into a traitor in the first flick, but since then, they've been pretty consistent with what IMF is supposed to be all about. Using American taxpayer dollars, go out and fix the world. Along the way, you might have to kill people, but it's all in a day's work. In this episode, IMF is shut down by the congressional black-operations funding subcommittee because the CIA thinks they're messing up all the time. Turns out a terrorist network is running interference on IMF and making them look like the bad guys. Ethan Hunt meets a pretty girl double agent, so we're wondering just who she's really working for. The original TV show didn't need guest stars to do the female agent roles, so I wish they'd bring back the Cinnamon Carter character from the TV series as a regular part of the team.

Lots of fans could hardly wait for the sequel to come out, and now that it's here, I went back and watched PP again to see if I missed something. Nope, all that junk is still there. I was hoping to see a musical, but a vapid teen/college comedy showed up instead with a sprinkling of "music" in it. Most of the major roles were occupied by actors closer to 30 than college age at the time the movie was made. The music is spotty, at best, and the lip-syncing/dubbing is terrible. A lot of "fat girls are funny" humor involving Rebel Wilson's character (can she actually do comedy, or just Funny Fat Girl stuff?) And when they resort to vomit humor more than once, you know a movie is short on writing talent. The only bright spot is Anna Kendrick, and her solo with that coffee mug. I can hardly wait for PP2 to come out - - - at the $2 video rental box, it's a sequel I can wait for....

I watched this flick in a half-full theater, and the other viewers could not resist doing their own running commentaries, like asking for lottery numbers or how well-endowed so-and-so's boy friend is, you know, the kind of questions college age girls would REALLY ask. The crowd turned a slightly interesting movie into a fun experience. The actress portraying the institutionalized older lady was a dead give-away, as soon as we saw her we knew what was going on. Interestingly, the theater manager looked a lot like the blonde girl who dies early in the movie, so I asked her if she thought a neat promotional gimmick would be to have a Ouija board in the lobby so customers could ask it who the real killer is before they see the movie, and she said "well, if people knew that they wouldn't buy tickets!" I repeat, she resembled the BLONDE in the movie. . . . .

Many critics miss the point of movies like this and complain about the "bad acting." It takes professionals to translate the freeze-frame action of a graphic novel to the action sequences in a movie, and this is one of those flicks. "Machete Kills" is currently in theaters, and you'll see the same techniques and "blocky" action. Think back to the spaghetti westerns which are now considered classics. "Bounty Killer" is a fun way to vicariously vent your rage at the corporations that are systemically destroying our way of life. If you can't believe in Mary Death, who is there left to believe in????? If this movie were made today as I'm writing this, it would be about the politicians responsible for the health care insurance fiasco we are currently experiencing in the USA, except that people aren't really mad enough to rebel and most of them will calm down by election time and re-elect most of these morons to Congress and they will continue to dump this crap on us. What will they ruin next? Films like this give us hope. There will always be Truth. There will always be Justice. There will always be Freedoms worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for. There will also always, somehow, be a steady supply of gasoline for the rebels to rampage around in their stripped-down SUV's and customized hot rods. And there will always, always, ALWAYS, be gorgeous hero babes like Mary Death! ! !

If this is an example of what Americans consider humor, God help us all. Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock play an "odd couple" law enforcement duo, McCarthy the streetwise trash-talking local Boston cop whose local investigation gets taken over when the FBI sends in the straight-laced college-educated Bullock. What transpires is a train wreck of "situation comedy" material that is repeatedly ruined by thee script-writers' reliance on the cussing and swearing by McCarthy's cop to replace their inability to come up with a good punch line. Bullock Is sent in to track down a major drug lord, and at first the friction between the two works well in setting up the punch-line opportunities, but it soon becomes apparent that their talents are being completely wasted in this flick except for whatever chemistry the two can manage to bring into this disaster. Halfway through the film it's obvious how things are going to end up: the case gets solved, and the pair end up working well enough together that we can expect a sequel if the box office goes well. This review is not being written by a flaming Bible-belt Christian, just a guy who is sick and tired of sitting through "buddy cop" movies that can't live up to the advance billing. The audience I was part of got lots of laughs, but I noticed most of that was coming from elderly ladies who were reacting to the shock value of the foul language coming from McCarthy. They were sitting in groups, so this was apparently a "gals night" outing; my town doesn't have a male strip club, so I guess this is the best they can do. Sandra Bullock has played this character so many times, it's lost its "funny" except that this time she had McCarthy to play off from and it kinda worked. I stayed over to watch "White House Down" for the third time to get my money's worth out of the $5 matinée discount ticket price.

When I walk into the theater or turn on my DVD player, I don't expect to see a representation of reality. So I cut people a lot of slack in how they depict crime stories. How else do you explain the CSI phenomenon, where the crime scene technicians are also the detectives who solve the crimes. I do expect to be entertained if John Cusack is involved. This film did not disappoint me, although I got the feeling after a while that somebody couldn't decide what they were making here, a horror thriller or a police suspense thriller. I decided to view it as a cop story, not unlike the thousands of novels out there which people like to read for fun, not to learn how police procedures and gathering of evidence are done in the real world. The basic plot has Cusack and his partner working a series of unsolved disappearances of women, and along the way his teenage daughter gets kidnapped by the same perpetrator. The detective figures that out fairly quickly and gets hot on the trail to track him down. The ending had what I saw as a double-twist, where the villain appears to get away with the crime, but the closing scene indicates one character has noticed things aren't quite right, which I interpreted as a possible set-up for a sequel in which that character pursues the case that remains unresolved. As the movie starts, police are investigating some missing women. At the end there are some other persons missing and you wonder if anybody's going to do anything about it. Some people left the theater thinking "the villain got away with it," but they weren't paying enough attention.

There was movie a long time ago, "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight," about some bungling mafia guys. ZDT could be subtitled "The Gang That Couldn't Think Straight," in reference to the bungling at the highest levels of the CIA that unnecessarily prolonged the track-down of Osama Bin Laden, except that this movie focuses on the analyst who stuck to the job and got it done, with only fleeting glimpses of the higher-level nitwits in D.C. that she had to deal with right up to the day of the climactic raid. I liked the way the story was told as a detective mystery thriller, not a military action violence-soaked saga like so many other war movies have been lately. Well, after all, the raid on Bin Laden's hideout lasted less than an hour anyway. What came up missing, though, was the backdrop of politics that pervades all decision-making in the CIA/Defense Department, and how their incompetence helped delay the tracking down of Osama Bin Laden. One scene depicts a suicide bomb attack at a "secure CIA base" in the Afghanistan in December 2009 killing eight Americans including a DC-based analyst, a direct result of CIA administrators bypassing security measures and sabotaging that analyst's efforts at finding Bin Laden, but we don't get that political backdrop in the movie. The heroine of Zero Dark Thirty had to have faced the same political hurdles, but all we see are the male vs. female attitude conflicts, like a bunch of guys in a meeting room who can only give the CIA Director 60 percent confidence they've found their target because they're afraid of saying 100-percent and putting their careers on the line. If the story/movie is accurate, my first question is "if this is the gal who found Bin Laden, why isn't she running the CIA now?" Well, because she's a woman, that's why, and the movie makes that crystal clear. It would have enhanced the movie to include scenes of what Bin Laden was doing in his lair all that time, based on what we now know that he wasn't "in the background of Al Qaeda" like many CIA thought simply because his house wasn't on the electric grid. It never occurred to these guys how a guy who hid in caves could mastermind 9/11, he could just as easily keep running the outfit while hiding in an apartment? Duh! The performance by Jessica Chastain is well worth the acclaim she has received for it.