Say your a guy who makes TV commercials for a living, but you have bigger dreams. You want to make movies, maybe documentaries, maybe get to met cool people and go cool places. Then one day you see that your childhood hero Paul Williams is putting on a show and you think, hey, I could follow Paul Williams around for a couple of years and see what happens. Paul Williams Still Alive reminds me a bit of Searching for Carrie Fisher in that our film maker comes across as much more of a stalker than a film maker. The movie…
Category: movie review
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
It’s possible that there are normal people who have normal experiences in High School-but no one ever makes a movie about those losers. The heroes of The Perks of Being a Wallflower are gay/drug addled/nymphos with just a touch of manic depression and suicidal tendencies. Well, maybe that is the normal high school experience. The main character is an angst riddled fellow with a dark secret in his past who starts the 9th grade with a countdown of how many days he has left until Graduation. He is transformed when he meets the usual gang of misunderstood outcasts and promptly falls…
Tom Cruise’s Oblivion
Oblivion is yet another movie about a world where the bulk of the earth’s population has been wiped out and a handful of survivors with virtually no chance of beating a vastly superior enemy-uh wait, that’s a lot closer to the end. We start off with Tom Cruise and a cute British woman with over-sized pupils going about the routine business of sucking all the water off the Earth’s surface so it can be shipped off to Titan, a large moon orbiting Jupiter. There are pockets of aliens hiding here and there that sabotage the equipment and Tom has to go out and repair it. Tom is Tech number…
ARGO
If Reading Lotia in Tehran made me think twice about the intelligence of the people living in Iran, ARGO brought back all my original feelings that the country should be nuked to a fine powder. ARGO was a great film. Here is the story of a group of Americans that escaped the US Embassy in Iran and hid out with the Canadian Ambassador while everyone else was held prisoner. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember these people at all-though I do clearly recall the running total on the evening news as day after day after day passed. Argo opens with…
Wreck It Ralph
In a small arcade filled with video games from the past thirty years or so, all the characters get together when the doors close for the night. They fall into two groups, the good guys and the bad guys. Ralph is a bad guy, kind of a cross between Donkey Kong and one of the monsters from the coin op game Rampage. As the bad guy, Ralph misses out on the fun stuff that the hero of his game, Fix-it Felix gets for saving the day every game. Ralph decides to follow in the footsteps of an old car racer…
The Host
Whittling down the almost 700 page novel The Host into the two hour movie The Host was never going to be easy-but Andrew Niccol seems to have done a pretty good job of hitting the high points. The Host movie is what The Host novel might have been if an Editor had the balls to tell Stephanie Meyers to rein it in a little. I liked The Host, the story of a race of benevolent overloads who travel the stars looking for populated planets to conquer-and they found ours a few years back. The bulk of the human race has…
Lincoln
Sometimes it’s hard to believe how far America has come in the past hundred and fifty years or so. Near the end of Lincoln, the Congress goes into riot mode, not when it’s suggest that slaves should be freed, but when it’s suggested that women and former slaves should be given the right to vote. They didn’t like the idea of interracial marriage, either. The bulk of Lincoln deals with whether or not the President will be able to get enough votes to pass the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution abolishing slavery. There is a lot of wheeling and dealing, a…
A&E’s Coma
Robin Cook wrote COMA, but I had to see it in the credits before I remembered, I thought it was by Michael Crichton. Oh, well. COMA is the story of a bunch of evil, greedy doctors who put profits before the welfare of their patients-sounds like nonfiction so far. Our modern day Nazis have decided that waiting for some kind of government approval is just a waste of time-it’s so much easier to just grab up the occasional patient that meets your study criteria and preform all the tests you want. Everything goes fine for thirty years or so, until…
The Master
A few years back Joaquin Phoenix went on the Late Show with David Letterman to tell the world that he was done with acting. He looked like a cross between a homeless man and an insane prophet. He acted completely nuts and followed this performance by not acting for several years. So it is kind of appropriate that his first film in many years sees him playing a madman. The Master is the story of a shell shocked sailor who spends most of his spare time mixing poisonous chemicals into intoxicating beverages. The ingredients for his concoctions include paint thinner,…
Skyfall
James Bond is an old man now. M is an even older woman. The good old days of being a spy are gone. Super Villains just aren’t what they used to be. Skyfall wasn’t too bad, it just wasn’t too great either. The film opens with a car chase and then has about a five minute long opening credits. I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw opening credits on a movie. It was one of countless little flashbacks to the good old days of Bond films. James Bond may be old, but he is standard issue Bond-James Bond. …