Lois (Princess Leia): Aren’t you a little fat to be a stormtrooper? Chris (Luke Skywalker): Well, stay here and rot, you stuck-up bitch! The Family Guy Star Wars stories are pretty much literal translations of the Star Wars movies. There are countless shot for shot sequences, only with a bit of nitpicking thrown in-such as the fact that Leia seems to be the only woman in the Galaxy and Yoda is pretty much a coward hiding out in his swamp. I was surprised that I got the same kind of feeling from watching these silly little cartoon parodies that I…
Category: movie review
Tron Legacy-Big on Looks
Tron Legacy was a visually stunning bit of work. The CGI world was rendered perfectly and I liked the way a de-ressed program fell into tiny cubes and sounded like shattered glass. We saw Tron Legacy in 3D, but it was clearly not made with 3D in mind. It opened with a slug screen telling us that parts of the film were in 2D, but we should keep our glasses on anyway. The most impressive 3D effects were in the Coming Attractions trailers. I still like 3D, I just wish people would stop adding it to a film as an…
Despicable Me
The local second run movie theater charges $1.25 so you can see a movie already avaible on DVD, but most of the time, these are not movies you want to own anyway. So recently, the Dollar Theater has upgraded one of it’s screens to 3D and is charging another $2 for 3D films. This is not too bad a deal, though the theater itself is still way on the run down side and it isn’t stadium seating. But hey, what do you want for $1.25? Anyway. Despicable Me is the story of a Super Villian named Gru trying to keep…
Salt-Missing The Cold War
So what to do when you have a bang up cold war story, but the good old USSR has been dead for lo these many years? Well, you just add one part Manchurian Candidate, one part Bourne Identity, and one part The Boys From Brazil. Viola! Salt is a nice spy story where the USSR wants to rise from the ashes and a sleeper agent has been waiting thirty years to strike, and by the way-that sleeper agent is not only super human but a hottie as well. Make no mistake, Salt is just a Star Vehicle for Angelina Jolie. …
Code 46 Can’t Tell The Players Without a Genome Card
We open with several pages of legalese explaining that it is against the law to have children with people who have either 100%, 50%, or 25% of the same genetic code as yourself. At the same time we see Tim Robbins flying over a vast desert, which surrounds the city of Shanghai. Clearly something has happened, something bad. We are never told what this something is. We are given hints that sunlight is bad-so bad that everyone now works at night and sleeps during the day. We are also told that clones and test tube babies are common. And most…
Avatar Extended Edition
There was a lot I didn’t like about Avatar when I first saw it. That whole going native story take straight from A Man Called Horse and Dances With Wolves. That whole ecological story lifted from Fern Gully and Battle for Terra. Those damned robot suits stolen from Mech Warrior that look just as fake here as they did in Matrix Revolutions. And the worst name for a mineral EVER-unobtainium. But for all its countless faults, Avatar is still a damned good movie. Watching it, you forget the hokey special effects and goofy movements of the CGI giant cat people…
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
Clocking in at about 3 hours-counting the mega dose of Coming Attractions-HP7.1 doesn’t feel like that long a movie. There are only a few breaks in the action-and then there is that whole Long Goodbye feeling that permeates the whole experience. Harry looking longingly at his former room under the stairs. Hagrid reminding us that he brought Harry into this magical world all those years ago. References to the other times that Harry has done battle with The Dark Lord. I began to loose my way in the Harry Potter world right after Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. …
The Ramen Girl starring Brittany Murphy
The Karate Kid with Noodles is how the wife described this quirky little film. The Ramen Girl is the story of a harebrained woman who follows her boyfriend to Japan, only to have him dump her as he heads off to greener pastures. The Fates intervene and guide her from her boring job as an office drone to take up the noble task of learning how to make soup. In standard When the Student is Ready the Master will Appear fashion our hero has a hard time working in the Ramen shop across the street from her apartment. Like all…
Monsters-A Classic Non-Action Movie
Ultra low budget film about an alternate Earth where NASA accidentally brings a race of giant octopus to Mexico. The film opens with a couple of Humvees rolling into battle with a land walking octopus which appears to be several stories tall. The soldiers spend a lot of time fire machine guns at the monster, which only serve to annoy the tentacle waving beastie. They then call in Air Support and as the bombs drop we lose the picture and shift scene to. . . A bored photographer and a spoiled little rich girl with an injured arm. For the…
Wall-e
Standard issue Pixar tear jerker that has gotten a bit of bad press for portraying humankind as a bunch of nasty litterbugs. I still liked it, though the story does have a few holes big enough to drive a Spacefaring Cruise ship through. The hero, such as he/it is, is a little robot bearing a striking resemblance to Number 5 from Short Circuit. His job is to clean up the Earth, one pile of scrap metal at a time. He is a walking garbage compactor who has been busy for the last 700 years or so turning random bits of…