Reviews

Not a false moment in the movie. Well acted by everyone in the cast. Great script, great story and lines. You're drawn to Tom Hardy's character (clearly channeling Mike Tyson in his ring persona) but Joel Edgerton is extremely skilled in portraying a high school physics teacher who returns to MMA. Edgerton totally sells his character because his character faces the bigger challenges and he is totally believable. Frank Grillo, who plays his trainer, is outstanding in a supporting role. The best scenes are between Hardy and Nick Nolte and are 100 percent believable. Amazingly acted. And all of it is to the credit of the director. There have been grander movies, more ambitious movies, but none better executed. I own a copy of the movie and I am writing this watching it on broadcast TV. It is that good. If you haven't seen it, watch it, you won't regret it.

but if that's what you want to see, you'd watch that instead of this. What Blue Thunder is, is a very well-done action movie. The plot is thin, a contrivance in order to pit Roy Scheider against Malcolm McDowell. McDowell, really, only lacks a mustache to twirl and a cape. (As someone else said, really, why WASN'T he ever a Bond villain? He'd have been much better than Jonathan Pryce or Christopher Walken, both fine actors miscast in their Bond bad-guy roles. He could have been a Bond bad-guy with THIS role.) The movie never drags. In the context of suspension of reality necessary for movies, the plot never makes you go, oh come on. You hiss McDowell, you root for Scheider. The ending is fairly predictable but no less satisfying. This movie was roaring good fun back in the 80s and it holds up now.

Performances in this movie were top notch. Others have praised Billy Bob Thornton, Tim McGraw, Derek Luke and others; I'll draw your attention to Julius Tennon, who played the coach of Dallas-Carter. He's pretty much the villain here, and he is _perfect_ in his role. He gives a performance that should have been up for a Supporting Actor Academy Award, if the Academy actually honored supporting actors (like, for instance, Dame Judy Dench in Shakespeare in Love; probably the last time an actor with an incidental role will be so honored) instead of second leads. The sideline scenes in FNL are all so well done, and you can see the chess match taking place in the minds of the coaches, particularly when one coach has all the pieces. I can't think of a better football movie that I've seen. I prefer it to Remember the Titans and North Dallas Forty, among those that come to mind.

The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Goodfellas, were transcendent movies. The Blind Side (TBS) is not, which is why it is not a great movie. But in terms of its themes, it is a serious, well-made movie.

The main point, IMO, is that there is a disconnect between the Christianity Americans profess and the Christianity that they practice. Michael Oher went to a Christian Academy. But he wasn't admitted because he was a child in need, he was admitted because they thought he might be a good football player. He was consistently viewed as an outsider, befriended by no one. Were the Touhys the only people who saw that he was in need, or were they the only ones to act on their Christian faith? And if the faith of others is so shallow, what does that say about the state of Christianity today? TBS doesn't beat you over the head with this, but it is there. You often see statements of Christian faith ("in God, all things are possible") juxtaposed with examples of how people fall short of those ideals. Bullock's character is a right-wing, gun-toting, fundamentalist Christian. That such a person would take a 300-pound black kid into her home only shows how deep HER Christian faith is.

Another theme in TBS is how much of the plight of the black underclass is a result of their own behavior as opposed to the plight they find themselves in. TBS told you _a lot_ about Oher, but it did it through exposition, not dialogue. You saw his mother, you saw his background. You saw the thugs in the 'hood and you saw how utterly different he was from them and you knew, somehow, that that difference in character was why he was where he was, and why they were where they were.

Race, class, faith – all in a Hollywood movie about a football player. And the script makes sense and the performances ring true. I was glad I saw TBS and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Interracial relationships are a serious matter within the black community. Black women marry at lower rates than white women or black men, and many blame "the good brothers" seeking out white women as a cause. It is a complicated topic that involves the rate black men are incarcerated (which is a byproduct of the drug war), educational opportunities for blacks that black women disproportionately utilize, and no doubt a culture resulting from families headed by black women; black man leaves a black woman, that woman might not pass along a positive view of black men to her kids.

So a movie that takes on the topic of the "good black men" being attracted to white women could be provocative. This ain't the one. You cannot take this movie seriously, because it's like Jungle Fever without (a) good directing (b) a thoughtful script (c) any kind of a plot that makes sense or (d) any examination of the racial dynamics. In point of fact, Rihanna could have played the Larter role and wouldn't have made a whit of difference (other than it would have been poorly acted; Larter's pretty good in the role).

The racial makeup of the poster implies that Idris, happily married to a black woman, is obsessed with a blonde white woman. Make the white woman a psycho, and you have an interesting picture -- a juxtaposition of two irrationalities (and for the record, I'm a black guy engaged to a white blonde female). But Larter's pretty much your garden-variety psycho babe (you know, in real life, the psycho babes are never hot like Rebecca DeMornay or Ali Larter, they always look like that nutjob astronaut who wore Pampers so she wouldn't have to stop during her getaway). Larter's race is never even MENTIONED.

All that said, I thought the movie was entertaining, because Ali Larter is HAWT and Idris Elba is a fine actor. (Matter of fact, the cast is first rate. Trivial point: is it just me, or did Idris Elba's character look like Magic Johnson, who was an Executive Producer?) Of course, I was entertained by Shoot Em Up. And it is clichéd, but clichés are like an old friend coming by: if you expect it, you're fine with it.

(Ali Larter HAD to be HAWT because she's so supposed to give Idris thoughts of cheating on Beyonce, who, in my mind, is world-class HAWT.)

Another commenter talked about how Beyonce's character got all ghetto in a crunch. To me, that was one thing that rang true. You may rise up out of the ghetto, but trust me, people take that ghetto "Ima kick yo ass" attitude with them. You may think of it as "oh no you didn't"; it's the same thing.

To me, this movie was kind of like Waiting to Exhale, except the brother didn't leave with the white girl. Instead of taking out on the brother, Beyonce took it out on the white girl. But the satisfaction a black female audience would get is the same. It really seemed to me like a black woman's wet dream: college girl gets the good man who gives her an Escalade and a mansion and wouldn't give the HAWT "skinny ass" (that's a quote from the movie) white girl a tumble AND will take her crap and come back begging. That's black single woman porn, right there: a fantasy that bears no relation to reality.

It is one of those movies that makes you talk through it ("Get out of my house"? Really? You with no job? Your house?), usually about how dumb or wrong one character is at a given moment (and, as such, demands to be seen outside the theatre environment; I can only imagine what it was like to see this in a theatre). But I watched three movies in a day (the other two were Valkyrie and Frost/Nixon) and this was the ONLY one I popped popcorn for. It's not Orson Welles behind the camera and it's not Lawrence Olivier and Katherine Hepburn in front. Enjoy it for what it is.

(By the way, poor Christine Lahti plays her part as if she had been teleported into the set. You can actually see her thinking "I must really need a paycheck to perform in this drivel." And why is it that when a cop is a character, the plot always acts like he/she is the only cop in the state? They're always the first to arrive at the scene, no matter WHEN the 911 call went out, and they're reliably never on time.)

In short: HAWT women, Idris Elba and moments of high comedy elevate otherwise thoroughly pedestrian fare. I've seen worse ("Betrayal" comes immediately to mind).

There are some movies that make me just stop what I'm doing and watch. Braveheart, Clear and Present Danger, Casino Royale, Godfather I and II, Goodfellas, Top Gun are just a few that come to mind. Not all are classics, but all have _something_ to them that engrosses me. She's All That is one of those movies.

Yes, Rachel Leigh Cook is so so cute. Fuggedaboudat. Watch her. See if she delivers one line as if she memorized it, as if she's repeating what someone else wrote. There's not one unnatural act or utterance from her. She is completely believable, and because her character rings so true, you cannot help but empathize with her, and that is what makes the movie -- when she wins out in the end, you're happy she did because she makes you care about her. She's as good as Kate Blanchett was in The Aviator (completely different movies, completely different roles, by Blanchett deservedly won an Oscar). She has that character absolutely nailed, you won't see - can't see -- a better performance.

(And for what it is worth, this may be Paul Walker's best performance. I credit the director for getting the performances that he did out of cast of young actors not generally known for their talent.) As for the rest of the movie, you've seen it before, but so what? Star Wars is Battle of Britain, set in the future with a backstory, no one holds that against it. The choreographed dance scene is great, and it IS well cast and it IS well acted, clichéd or not.

Let me start with the profanity: it is SO true to Boston, particularly South Boston (known as "Southie"). (Southie is a particularly idiosyncratic neighborhood, as you can see from the way its inhabitants are portrayed.) The accents (even Robin Williams') rang true to this ex-Bostonian, and the dialogue was spot on. The script was perfect. And the performances were uniformly top-notch: Robin Williams was so believable as the educated psychiatrist who still hadn't left behind his Southie roots. He's never been better, before or since, which is a credit to Gus Van Sant.

I've been to MIT and Harvard, I've been to Southie, and I've lived in Boston. They are exactly as shown in the movie, warts and all. Hate on the movie if you will (and for the life of me, I cannot understand why), but you cannot attack its authenticity.

Not just best animation, best picture, period. Great voice acting, smart, funny script. Any objections to the movie are just quibbles. Remy is the most memorable character to come along in years. The best movie scripts develop the unique personalities of the individual characters, and Ratatouille does this, maybe better than any movie I have seen since Diner. Peter O'Toole doing Anton Ego's review -- it does not get any better. I doubt the AMPAS membership has the guts to put an animated feature up for Best Picture, but they found a reason to ignore Citizen Kane and Russell Crowe in LA Confidential, so that means zilch. Ratatouille is the best picture to come out of Hollywood this year.

As a BIG fan of Sean Connery -- perhaps the last great movie star -- I have to say Craig may have delivered the best Bond portrayal. He'll never have that Connery persona, but he's tremendous in the role. Bond is, essentially, a hired killer for the British Government (and Craig certainly looks the part, from his muscled physique to his steely cold blue eyes). As the movie shows, Bond _cannot_ be a thug ("any thug can kill", as M says), but we see him evolve into the more refined -- and more advanced -- Bond that we know. From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and On Her Majesty's Secret Service were my Bond movie gold standards and this one ranks with them. One way you know this movie is good is that there will never be an Austin Power's parody. This Bond is deadly serious.

To be sure, there are a lot of elements in old Bond movies that aren't in CR -- Moneypenny, Q, phantasgorimical gadgets, one-liners -- and if that makes a Bond movie for you, you won't like CR. This movie is not some fantasy. The score is OK, it's certainly not among the best of Bond. If you're too dim to "get" the opening theme, you're too dim to "get" the movie. The James Bond Theme appears at the end, for a reason that I thought obvious, but which appears to have escaped most critics -- which makes me think they're looking for something, ANYTHING, to criticize. Oddly, the weakest parts of the movie -- particularly the romance, which was poorly realized, I thought -- were in the original book. But if you want to see a story that focuses on Bond the character, from the point of view of his origins and motivations, CR is a must-see. Although the overall plot line is mediocre due to a weak third act, the dialogue is some of the best ever in a Bond movie. And when Craig does get a witty line, he nails them (viz his line when returning to the poker table, and his little finger line). They have more impact because they're employed more judiciously. People have issues with a woman M, but when the woman is Dame Judi Dench, you need to lose the issues. She nails every line; I particularly liked her line "one more syllable and I'll have you shot".) Eva Green didn't do much for me, but her part wasn't terribly well written, in that we didn't see her romance evolving with Bond. She had some good dialogue, though.

I must say, after reading several reviews criticizing the movie, I find them rather odd. Martin Campbell is criticized as a hack, but his prior work with Bond ("Goldeneye") was hailed by many of the same people lambasting him for CR. (For the record, I though his work was quite good in both.) And the critics all seem to hate different aspects of CR -- some think Craig didn't look the part, some did, some said it was too much like Jason Bourne (because it WASN'T a fantasy), some hated the product placement (like we haven't seen THAT in recent Bonds) -- point being, they seem to have hated CR PURELY because it was CR. Judge the movie on its own merits. (I particularly like the review that said "everyone in the theater were in admiration and awe, except me" -- Dyan think maybe YOU'RE the one out of step? For the record, the movie drew applause at the closing credits.) One thing one anti-Craig site harps on is that CR has trailed Happy Feet at the box office, disregarding (a) Happy Feet is the no. 1 movie, CR has run no. 2, (b) Happy Feet is something of a phenomenon; everyone I know who has seen it raves about it (the same is true for CR) (c) Casino Royale, per theater, out performed Happy Feet which was released in 370 more theaters (According to Box Office Mojo, Casino Royale acquired, on average, $11,890 per theater, while Happy Feet grossed $10,918 per theater.) (d) CR will go down as one of, if not the, biggest grossing Bond movies ever. A movie that grosses almost $400 million worldwide in less than a month is an unmitigated financial success, anyway you slice it.