Here, then, are my thoughts on the handful of movies I saw since my last movie post.  Sadly, the summer movie season is drawing to an end, so there’s only one more on my list to see (The Expendables).

Salt

Much like when I saw The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the girlfriend and I took in Salt because we wanted to see a movie and had seen everything else of higher interest.  This Angelina Jolie vehicle tried to bill itself as a thriller where nobody knew what was really going on.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the case.

It was entertaining enough, with a number of nice action sequences, but it was largely predictable.  The sort of movie where there’s a binary choice to the truth—the “Is the protagonist actually the villain?” genre—has been done to death.  In older movies, the answer was always, “No!”  Then, to shake it up a bit, a lot of movies had the answer being, “Yes.”  And that really exhausts the possibilities.

So now modern movies try to make you think the answer is no when really it’s yes, or vice versa,  But it always works out to one or the other, so whatever you guess, you have a 50/50 chance of being right.  And if the filmmakers are clumsy about telegraphing their intent, the odds go way up in your favour.  Coupled with casting some actors who always play the bad guys, and there’s not a whole lot of mystery left.

Now, as a plain action movie it was fine, but if you’re relying on the mystery for your enjoyment, Salt may fall short.  Otherwise it was a perfectly adequate movie.

The Other Guys

The girlfriend and I took this one in to stay out of a rainstorm.  It was an extremely pleasant surprise.  Normally I don’t really like Will Ferrell movies, but his buddy cop feature that pairs him with Mark Whalberg worked really well, and is way funnier and different than the trailers would lead you to expect.

The main plot is a somewhat conventional buddy cop storyline that provides a fair amount situational comedy.  What I liked best, though, was the layer of absolutely bizarre and random humour laid over top of it.  There were jokes in this movie that were completely out of left field, that I could never have predicted.  I’m absolutely delighted when that happens.  Consequently, this movie turned out to be a lot of fun.  I’m comfortable giving it a recommendation.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

For me personally, this movie had a lot in its favour: based on a Canadian comic that I enjoy, directed by Edgar Wright of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame, and a pretty solid cast.  I’m thrilled to say it lived up to my expectations.  Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was one of my favourite movies of the summer.

That said, the demographic is really the under-35 crowd, as it is steeped in the world of video games, anime, and indie music.  I suspect that just watching the Universal logo at the beginning is enough for you to tell whether you’ll enjoy the movie or not.  The creator of the comic—Bryan Lee O’Malley—is the same age as me, and thus grew up with all the same cultural touchstones, and that shines through in the comic and the movie.

The movie basically embodied fun, with lighthearted and entertaining fight scenes, an over-the-top cast of odd-but-largely likable characters.  Possibly the weakest character is the eponymous Scott Pilgrim (ably played by Michael Cera), but the whole point of the movie is his growth from useless slacker into a decent guy.  Getting from A to B is where the fun lies.  Highly highly highly recommended.

The Last Airbender

I really wanted this movie to be awesome.  I mean, I want all the movies I see to be awesome, but for this one I had  especially high hopes.  This is because it was a live-action adaptation of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is one of the best things ever.

Now, I will admit to some trepidation when I heard that M. Night Shiyamalan was the driving force behind this film.  But, by all accounts, he was so excited by the cartoon that he fought to be able to make the movie, and at least the story was already coming from somewhere else, so there’d be no lame twist ending.  In fact, the first season of the show had one of the best endings to anything I’ve ever seen, so there’s no way he could screw that up, right?  And the trailers were looking pretty sweet, too.

But alas, all my hopes and dreams were dashed.  The Last Airbender had Lucas-esque dialogue, narrated montages that skipped over so much and explained character interactions rather than showing them, and just felt rough and unfinished.  It was also short.  I will grant they had a tough job, cutting 10 hours worth of TV down to a single movie, but they could have at least gone for a 2.5 to 3 hour movie rather than the abrupt 90 minutes we were given.

The ending also changed somewhat from the show, cutting out details making it just a little bit less awesome and a lot wussier.  Way to go, M. Night!  You could have filmed the last 3 episodes of the season shot-for-shot and had one of the best things ever on film, and you still managed to cock it up.

(It is my fondest hope that Shiyamalan was working busily away on a 3-hour awesome epic version of this movie when the studio told him it had to be released in a month, and so he whipped this version together in the little time he had, and that the DVD will have a super-cool Director’s Cut.)

The movie was not without *some* redeeming features: it did showcase a lot of cool ideas from the show, and the bending looked pretty good (though not quite right compared to the original).  Some of the actors were okay, but they weren’t given much to work with.

I wish I could recommend this movie wholeheartedly, but it was so rough, and so disappointing, I can’t.  About the best I can say is that if you do see it, the cool ideas that made it into the movie might inspire you to watch the original show, which is—as I have stated above—one of the best things ever.  (Also, if you do see the movie, see it in 2D—the 3D is the converted kind, not the filmed kind, and apparently sucks and makes the movie incredibly dim and an even worse experience.)

Despicable Me

This was a cute and funny CGI movie.  I saw this in 3D, but apart from a few token “wow” scenes nothing would have been lost seeing it in 2D.  It centers on Gru, a supervillain who gets scooped when a new villain steals the pyramids.  As part of his plan to regain his status as the most dastardly of supervillains, he adopts 3 orphan sisters.  Wackiness ensues.

From the setup, you can probably figure out the emotional arc of the plot, but it is still handled with charm and humour.  It doesn’t approach Pixar-quality, but it has plenty of laughs, some clever ideas, and some “Awwwwwww” moments.  A satisfying and entertaining summer movie.

Inception

This is the latest movie from Christopher Nolan, whose last movie (The Dark Knight) was all kinds of awesome.  As such, there was a lot riding on this to be a success, and a lot of hope from audiences that it would be different and good.  Thankfully, I think it succeeded on all fronts.

Inception is a sort of reverse heist movie.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays an expert at going into others’ dreams to steal ideas and knowledge who gets hired to *plant* an idea instead.  He has to assemble a team, make a plan, and then execute it (which inevitably goes wrong).  Wackiness ensues.

Now, the plot is more complicated than that.  A *lot* more complicated.  That may be the greatest problem in the movie.  They have to devote a lot of exposition to it in the first hour of the film, and then when the action kicks in it is somewhat-to-very confusing to follow what is really going on when the plan goes awry.  The overlapping action scenes are beautifully-constructed, though, and once you’ve given it a bit of thought, only the ending is left as ambiguous.

So, this is an excellent movie that is beautifully shot.  I saw it in IMAX, which was pretty sweet (except for sitting in the 3rd row like I did).  It’s not a simple action movie, it’s not quite a drama, but it is really good.  I recommend this one.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

I know, I know.  Disney movie, starring Nic Cage.  Why give it the time of day?  Well, we gave it the time of day because nothing was out that we hadn’t already seen that we might possibly find amusing.  But you know what?  It wasn’t bad.  In fact, I might even go so far as to say it was pretty good.

Nic Cage seems to have found his most natural role ever in playing a creepy, crazy old guy, and Jay Baruchel nailed his lovable nerd loser role (as he is wont to do).  The plot was a bit predictable, but it moved quickly, *mostly* made sense, and was pretty fun.  The visuals were good, and in some places genuinely clever.

So this movie was like the inverse of The Last Airbender: the trailers made it look awful, but it turned out to be surprisingly good.  It’s not the best movie of the year or anything, and it doesn’t really need a sequel, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours on a Friday night, and that is more than most movies can say these days.

Alice

Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland was only okay.  It was pretty, and had some cool and funny moments, but was generally just “meh”.  The plot didn’t make much sense, it had the same creepy Burton-esque imagery all of his films have, and the ending was uninspired.  Also, I saw the 3D version, which was crap—the movie wasn’t filmed in 3D, and the “conversion” process left a lot to be desired.  Anyway, this movie was passably entertaining, but there’s no need to seek it out.

She’s Out of My League

This movie is a bit out of my normal viewing habits, but it was that rarest of all creatures: a romantic comedy with a male protagonist.  This is not to be confused with the sex comedy, which is about guys trying to get laid and the wackiness that ensues.  This is an actual romantic comedy about a regular joe (played by Jay Baruchel, to whom I have been partial since seeing him in Fanboys and who is turning up all over the place these days) who ends up attracting the attention of a super-hot woman, and the wackiness that ensues as he tries to figure out how to get over his own insecurities so they can actually be together.

I enjoyed this one quite a bit.  It’s rare to find a modern romantic comedy that doesn’t irk me in some way, but this one worked for me overall.  If you’re looking for such fare, you could do worse than this one.

Clash of the Titans

I saw this movie in 2D after hearing that the 3D sucked.   (Experience with the “converted-to-3D” Alice suggested such conversions were no good, anyway.)  Though unfamiliar with the original movie, I had high hopes for this one—I figured, giant monsters fighting each other, how could it go wrong?

Alas, the title misled me, and the movie was a confusing jumble, with a demigod and his companions on a quest to stop the Kraken.  The visual effects were fine, and some of the battles were pretty sweet, but the hero and his companions were all stock characters without a lick of inventiveness about them, and you could pretty much predict the order they’d die in.

I think that this was possibly the most disappointing movie of the last two months, simply because it would have been so easy to make this better than it was.

Kick-Ass

Now this was a tremendously awesome movie.  The girlfriend described it as Kill Bill with an 11-year-old, and that’s damned accurate for parts of it.  The trailers made this look like as if it was a “teenage boy decides to become a superhero”, which does happen, but what the movie actually does is show how awful and horrifying such a life can be for everyone involved in it.  It pulls this off with a lot of profanity, graphic violence, and touching moments of humour and kindness.  This is certainly one of my favourites so far this year.

Iron Man 2

The original Iron Man movie was a tough act to follow.  It came out of nowhere, and was so good at balancing action and character depth and development.  Thus, I had a lot of trepidation about the sequel.  Thankfully, I wasn’t disappointed.

Iron Man 2 was a good movie.  Not as good as its predecessor, not quite becoming great.  But it was entertaining.  Lots of great action sequences.  It was fun.  I think, however, that they tried to cram in too much character development without giving enough screen time to do it right, leaving it feeling rushed and superficial.  I would have happily given up some of the action sequences in favour of the character depth.

My fondest hope is that the inevitable Iron Man 3 raises the bar again, rather than dropping the ball as all of Marvel’s other part threes have.

Gunless

This was a Canadian Western movie starring Paul Gross.  That may tell you everything you need to know.  Overall, it was pretty entertaining.  It had genuinely funny moments, but also its share of cliches.  It doesn’t redefine the Western genre or anything, but is well-produced and well-performed.  Fun, and worth watching if you come across it.

Robin Hood

This movie was much better than I expected, although it was severely lacking in Alan Rickman.  While it is supposedly an origin story of Robin Hood, there was very little about it that had any meaningful connection to various Robin Hood legends other than the character names.  Other people have referred to this as “Gladiator in England”, and they’re not wrong.  Still, the story was coherent and compelling (although my medievalist friends were less than enamored of certain aspects), the soundtrack was good, and—apart from some shaky-cam—the battle scenes were fun.  A quality movie overall.

Shrek Forever After

The fourth Shrek movie was another pleasant surprise.  I had felt that the second and third movies in the franchise veered a little too much into self-congratulation and knowing winks to the audience in the form of wall-to-wall pop culture references, but this movie was closer to the original in form.  It didn’t beat you over the head with pop culture references (though it still had them), it did beat you over the head with the character arc (as all of the others have done), and it worked as a fun, lighthearted movie.  I liked it almost as much as the first.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

This may be the best movie ever made that was based on a video game.  By that comment, I certainly do mean to damn with faint praise.

Apart from the more general issues (none of the princes of Persia look especially Persian, for example), my major criticism relates to the action and parkour scenes.  Unlike Jenn, I found the parkour scenes uneven.  The sequence when he was a kid was great, with all the action and moves visible and easy to follow.  Once Jake Gyllenhaal takes the screen, the camera zooms in so all you can see are his rippling pecs, and none of the actual parkour.  Admittedly, Jenn and I are in different demographics, and so her appreciation of the “parkour” may have a different motive than mine.

Anyway, the movie was entertaining, even though a number of the characters acted in completely arbitrary and/or stupid ways in order to further the plot.  The rationale behind the ending was unclear, and the ending itself was a bit of a cop-out, undermining everything that happened in the movie itself.  I think this is best considered as the sort of movie that you might watch on late-night TV rather than seeking it out on purpose.

[Update 02 July 2010] How could I forget the best part of this movie?  The ostrich racing, ran by Alfred Molina’s character.  That was almost worth the price of admission itself.  (To clarify, this is ostrich racing where the ostriches have riders.  So like horse races, not dog races.  Awesome.)

The Karate Kid

I went to see this movie because, well, it was a cheap weekend morning  movie and nothing else was out at the time.  I was sort of appalled when I saw the trailers for a movie called The Karate Kid where they were clearly studying kung fu, and also that they were remaking a cheesy 80′s movie series.  I mean, I think Jackie Chan was a great choice for the mentor, but they turned it into a little kids’ movie.

But it turns out the movie wasn’t so bad.  I found it a little slow to begin with, but I was actually pretty impressed with the fight choreography when stuff started going down.  They gave Chan’s character a bit more depth than Mr. Miyagi got in his first movie, and had some nice training montages.  Jaden Smith did a good job as a lead, too, for such a young actor.  I was rather surprised to see full-contact martial arts tournament in a kid-oriented movie, too, but I certainly enjoyed it.  Perhaps not worth heading out to see, but not a bad watch.

The A-Team

This movie was delightful.  The cast was solid in taking over roles from the classic TV show, the plot was delightfully ridiculous, and the action non-stop.  In fact, my only criticism might be that there was too much action, and so the audience was left with little down time.  I think I would have enjoyed some longer, more in-depth planning sequences than we were treated to, but that’s a minor quibble.  The movie poked fun at itself and its origins, cleverly acknowledging how ridiculous their plans could get and mocking the action movie genre in general.

Oh, one other thing: the final action sequence was perhaps a bit too explosive.  Without giving anything away, let me just say that the same people who built the hotel in Quantum of Solace turned their hands to shipbuilding, leading to a climactic battle that was just a little too CGI-heavy and over-the-top (a.k.a. Michael Bay-like).  But the movie is super-fun overall.

Toy Story 3

I ended up seeing this movie twice, once in 3D and once in 2D, for two reasons: both showings were cheap, and it was really good.  Now, I’m not really a fan of the Toy Story franchise.  I’ve only watched the first one on TV while doing something else, and I don’t think I had seen the second at all.  (I came to Pixar around Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo, and have been stuck with them ever since—except for Cars.)  I say this to clarify that I don’t have 15 years of history with these characters.

Nonetheless, the movie was tightly plotted, with well-paced plot and emotional arcs (as I have come to expect from Pixar) and an ending that left me teary-eyed both times.  (Not Up-weepy, but still not bad.)  It’s just a really well-done movie, and should be satisfying to fans of the other two.

Regarding the 2D versus 3D: I saw the 3D one first, and honestly didn’t notice it much, except for the two or three occasions where they did something up really high and I thought, “Now there’s a shot put in for 3D.”  More to the point, I didn’t miss anything at all in the 2D version—it seemed perfectly excellent to me.  So maybe saving your extra $3 is not a bad thing, but see this movie.  Highly recommended.

In general, I prefer the music of Coulton to Paul and Storm (though I like both quite a lot), but in the live shows, Paul and Storm are absolutely hilarious in their between-song banter.  Most of the stuff they had played in their previous shows, but that included favourites like “Nun Fight”, “Live”, and “The Captain’s Wife’s Lament” so it was much appreciated.  They also played a couple of songs I hadn’t heard before, and I very much enjoyed “Frogger! The Frogger Musical”.  By the end of the opening act, my jaw was aching from laughing so much.

Coulton took the stage after a short break, and basically played all of my favourite songs of his.  He also did a few I was less familiar with, although “Sunny Blue Day”, which I first heard at his last show in Toronto, is rapidly becoming another favourite.  An excellent set indeed.

About the only thing I’m unsure of  was the venue.  Previous shows were at the Lula Lounge, which didn’t have assigned seating, but had a friendly and comfortable atmosphere, and felt like a more intimate space.  In contrast, the Enwave Theatre was a bit bigger and a proper theatre, with a stage, balconies, and the like, but it felt… stodgier.  The staff enforced no food/drink/photography rules, when a quick search of YouTube will demonstrate that Coulton is not shy about letting fans record his shows.  And while everyone had a good view thanks to how the seating was arranged, the openness of the theatre space made it feel sort of empty.

(However, that may be an issue unique to me.  My seat was on the balcony nearest the stage—great view, but no one in front of or behind us.  So I didn’t get that feeling of being in a crowd at concert.  During the chorus to “Re: Your Brains” when the audience joins in, I wasn’t surrounded by a horde of singing zombies as I was at the Lula Lounge.  But even down below, the crowd seemed tamer than previous year’s shows.)

Anyway, an excellent show all around.  If you ever get the chance to see either Coulton or Paul and Storm, take it.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

The first movie I saw this month was a kid-targeted adaptation by director Chris Columbus of a popular series of books.  No, not the first Harry Potter movie (though they have been on TV lately…), but The Lightning Thief.

The movie was okay.  It was entertaining, but the plot wasn’t especially tight—several times I found myself asking why the characters were doing something so stupid, but naturally it was for the advancement of the story.  From other reviews I’ve read, the movie diverged rather significantly from the source material in several ways, so I can only hope the characters weren’t quite so dumb in the books.

The main character is the demigod son of Poseidon, charged with finding out who stole Zeus’s lightning bold (hence the title) else the gods will go to war and destroy the human world in the process.  Wackiness ensues as the unusually gifted boy goes to a camp of other demigods to learn to harness his powers, gains a comic-relief sidekick male friend and a brainy war-strategist female friend, and the trio then strikes out on their own to do what they think is right.

Obviously, the movie hews close the Potter model, but is drenched in Greek mythology, which is refreshing and fun.  The visual effects were also quite well done, what with the monsters and gods and such.  Ultimately, it wasn’t quite as good as the good Potter movies, but it was still fun and entertaining.

Defendor

Defendor was an unexpected delight.  I had little idea of what to expect other than Woody Harrelson as a superhero, which I figured would be awesome after his turn in Zombieland.  The movie did give me Harrelson as a superhero, but not in quite the way I expected.  And it was fantastic.

Harrelson plays Arthur Poppington, a low-IQ construction worker who created an alternate identity for himself as “Defendor”, to track down the evil Captain Industry.  I can’t really summarize the movie in greater depth, because it’s not quite like anything I’ve seen before.

Harrelson turns in a strong performance for the role, and the rest of the cast holds up their end as well.  The movie is funny and tragic and dark by turns, with a bittersweet ending that had me (not so successfully) blinking back tears.  I wholeheartedly recommend this movie—it has fairly limited distribution, but if you do get a chance to see it, do so.

Cop Out

Cop Out is a buddy-cop movie starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, and was directed (but not written) by Kevin Smith.  This movie has been getting a lot of advertising lately, and looked passably entertaining, but it was Kevin Smith’s involvement that made me sure I wanted to see it.  To my knowledge, this is the first movie he has directed that he hasn’t written, but I like his stuff in general, so I hoped that the movie would be good.

Thankfully, it was.  While it didn’t blow my mind or vastly surpass my expectations, it was a funny buddy-cop movie with decent action and a well-paced plot in which Bruce Willis’ character is trying to recover a rare baseball card stolen from him while he was trying to sell it to pay for his daughter’s wedding.  Naturally, wackiness ensues, and they run up against a gang of Mexican drug dealers who have the card and need a favour in return.

About the only thing this movie lacked was explosions.  But it was funny and entertaining, full of swearing and shooting and jokes; you could do far worse with your movie-going dollars.

In the midst of all of this, however, I did manage to see a number of movies, and while it had never been my intent to make this a movie blog, they have come to dominate (as they are my most frequent and easily-ranted-about entertainment).  Without further ado, I present my thoughts on the three movies I saw in theatre in January.

Thoughts on Up in the Air

This movie is not the normal sort of movie I write about here.  (I do watch some movies outside of the science fiction/fantasy/action/comedy category—though not many—but I generally don’t hold  forth on them.)  However, this movie was good enough to warrant some public praise.

I guess it is technically a drama, though it has plenty of humour throughout.  George Clooney plays a likable jackass who fires people for a living, and lives to travel, with no ties, no connections, just freedom.  He is teamed up with a young woman who plans to revolutionize his business and tie him down, and the movie is about him realizing maybe connections aren’t so bad.

That description doesn’t really do it much justice; the movie just works on basically every level.  Tension, family conflict, and humour are all well balanced into a movie that is (mostly) unpredictable, clever, nice, and yet doesn’t end too neatly.  Up in the Air gets the Andrew House seal of approval.

Sherlock Holmes

Boom!  Now this was my usual kind of movie.  As most of my familiarity with Sherlock Holmes comes via Star Trek: The Next Generation, I’m not a stickler for accuracy to the source material, and so the obvious… liberties taken with it do not bother me.  Guy Ritchie put together a snappy, fast-paced action movie with highly entertaining characters and a fine cast.  I was worried a little bit in the middle that they were actually introducing mystical/occult stuff, but thankfully it all worked out in the end.  A very fun and ridiculous movie—though not one for Holmes purists—that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Legion

The girlfriend wanted to see this one, and it turned out to be better than I expected.  I guess it was a sort of horror movie, though thankfully not a part of the torture porn genre, which has a former angel protecting an unborn child from the possessed masses after the apocalypse.  There were some genuinely creepy bits, some nicely gross bits, some cool action scenes, and, well, that was mostly it.  The reason for the apocalypse was kind of unclear, and the reason the unborn child could stop it was even more unclear—the movie did not lend itself well to deep introspection.  But it had a bit of tension, creepiness, and coolness, and so it kind of worked, for the kind of movie it is.

And that’s all I’ve got.

* * *

Coraline

I already wrote about Coraline, which was a most excellent stop-motion movie based on the children’s book by Neil Gaiman.  Recommended for anyone who enjoys creepy fantasy, but perhaps not for very young (or especially wussy) children.

Watchmen

I wrote about this before, as well.  Watchmen was a good adaptation of the graphic novel that fell just shy of being great.  I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Dragonball: Evolution

I also wrote about this one.  (Clearly, I started the year with a bit more drive to do my movie blogging on time—or perhaps the summer movie season just overwhelmed me with frequency.)  This movie was not nearly as bad as it could have been, but it occupies some sort of weird zone between not being close enough to the source material to satisfy all the existing fans, and _too_ close to the source material to appeal to new viewers.  I had fun watching it, but I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to.  Perhaps my best endorsement is this: there is no need to avoid this movie.

Fanboys

I held forth on this film as well, and quite enjoyed it.  I’m not sure people who aren’t Star Wars fans would get quite as much enjoyment as I did, but it was still a funny road trip comedy, with a nicely dark vibe running through it too.

Monsters vs. Aliens

I also wrote about this one, which was okay.  It was an adequately entertaining CG movie.  I did not feel upset or angry after having seen it, or that I had wasted my money, so that’s a plus, I guess?

Star Trek

Despite my reservations with certain elements of the Star Trek reboot (see this previous entry), I loved this movie.  It was great fun, and was pretty successful at pulling together a young new cast to fill the shoes of the iconic classic actors.  ‘Nuff said.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I also had a number of issues with this movie (see this previous posting), but was still entertained by it. The story had some problems, but the action was all pretty entertaining, and it was far and away better than X-Men 3, so kudos for that.  An adequate action movie, but it failed to live up to its potential.

Terminator: Salvation

That’s pretty much all I can say about Terminator: Salvation.  It was a passable action movie, but it turned out to be a prequel to the original trilogy, rather than showing an end to the war with Skynet.  So there was some combat sequences, and cool giant robots, and… well, that was sort of it.  Once we understood the timeframe, we kind of knew how things would end, since we’ve seen the other movies.  As a result, it was a rather disappointing conclusion to the Terminator movie saga, but in its own context it was reasonably entertaining.

Up

Pixar’s Up was fantastic, despite (or perhaps because of) the incredibly sad first ten or fifteen minutes.  As usual, Pixar hit on all cylinders, with excellent voice actors, a great script that had a perfectly-paced story, nice humour, and wonderful visuals.  Up was another example of why Pixar movies aren’t great because of their computer animation, but because they do everything else right, too.

The Hangover

This movie diverges somewhat from the overall science fiction and fantasy skew of my general movie watching, but I do enjoy my comedies, so long as they’re funny.  Thankfully, The Hangover fit the bill, and was a fun entry into the wacky night they can’t remember/road trip genre that defied convention in a few clever ways and yet didn’t refrain from toilet humour.  Highly enjoyable.

Moon

I had almost forgotten about Moon, which is unfortunate, because it was one of the better proper science fiction movies I have seen in a long time.  A (comparatively) low-budget movie about a miner on the moon, most of the movie has only one actor on screen, unless you count Kevin Spacey as the voice of the robot companion.

That makes it sound a bit claustrophobic and corny, I know, but the lead actor (Sam Rockwell?) does an excellent job, and the story is quite clever.  I was able to predict some elements of it (likely due to my greater familiarity with science fiction as a whole genre), but in terms of science fiction movies, I can’t think of anything quite like it.  It is most definitely not a sci-fi action movie.  But it was good.  Really good.  I liked it.  My girlfriend liked it.  A definite recommendation from me.

Ponyo

Ponyo is, I believe, the latest movie from Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary master of Japanese animation, and was released in North America by Disney.  (Pixar’s John Lasseter is a huge Miyazaki admirer, and was a driving force behind Disney’s aquisition of North American distribution rights for the Studio Ghibli oeuvre.)

Ponyo is a traditional 2D animated movie, with the story loosely adapted from the original Little Mermaid fairy tales.  The animation was beautiful, and intense and terrifying in places, but overall it was a cute movie aimed at younger viewers.  More like Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro” than “Princess Mononoke”, for sure.  Still, any admirer of quality animation will appreciate this film.  I look forward to adding it to my Ghibli collection.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I have only read the first Harry Potter book, so all my knowledge of the story comes from the movies.  As such, I can judge the movies by whether they work as movie, rather than by how well they adapt the book.  For example, I thought the third movie (Azkaban) was great, but a lot of people were upset by how much was left out from the book.  The fourth movie tried to put in bits of everything, and it ended up being practically incomprehensible as a movie without knowledge of the books.  Thankfully, they got back on track with the movies for the fifth one, and continued the trend with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

It was a good movie.  It continued the story nicely (as you would expect), had some great visuals, intense moments, and a coherent story that came to the end leaving us wanting more.  We learned things we didn’t know, and did it because the characters were smart.  So I count this movie as a win.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

This movie was so terrible that my rage moved me to write of it after seeing it.  I think the comedy group Hot Waffles needs to rewrite their song “George Lucas Raped My Childhood” to feature Michael Bay instead.  This may have been the worst movie I have ever spent my own money to see.

Unfortunately, it made a hojillion dollars, so there will likely be a Transformers 3.  My only hope is that, like me, everyone else who saw this movie was so appalled that they will avoid any future installments like the plague.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Alongside Transformers, G.I. Joe was the other foundational toy of my childhood.  (Star Wars and Lego were also prominent, but Star Wars toys were adapted from the movie, not vice versa, and there hasn’t been a Lego movie yet, so I’m limiting myself to Transformers and G.I. Joe for the sake of comparison.)  After the abominable live action Transformers movies, I was less than hopeful for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Thankfully, it exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations, and turned out to be a fun, if ridiculous, action movie.  I’m not exactly sure I’d recommend it, but it was silly and enjoyable.  My biggest beef was that they revamped the background of all the characters, removing their diverse and long-established origins and making them all interconnected and less interesting.

They set up a sequel, which I’m sure I’ll go see.  This was much better than the first Transformers (live action) movie, so even if they drop the ball on the second like they did with Transformers, hopefully it won’t fall as far.

Surrogates

This is a Bruce Wilis movie.  A friend of mine said he expected that, at the end, Bruce Willis would survive, and win the day, and be beaten to a bloody pulp.  He was not wrong.

Surrogates was an enjoyable SF movie about a world of the near future in which people live primarily through robotic surrogates that they control remotely from their homes.  The Surrogates never age, and can look like anything, from an idealized version of the owner to someone completely different.  Trouble starts when some surrogates are killed and and so are the owners connected to them, which should be impossible.  Bruce Willis (a cop, naturally) is put on the case to investigate.

As the story unfolds, we encounter a number of twists and turns, some cool action sequences, and some interesting characters.  I hadn’t read the graphic novel on which this was based, so I don’t know about the _accuracy_ of the adaptation, but at least the quality is high.  I recommend this movie.

The Imgainarium of Doctor Parnassus

I saw the gala premiere of this movie at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which I wrote about here.  I don’t have much more to say than that.  It was a good movie, very Gilliam-esque, with delightful visuals and quirky characters and storylines.  Not for everybody, to be sure, but it will definitely resonate with the right audience.

Time Trip: Curse of the Viking Witch

The other TIFF movie I saw was a Norwegian movie about some kids who travel through time to help and immortal viking become mortal so he can die.  Not bad, actually, for a kids movie.  Not so good that you need to figure out how to import the DVD or anything, but not bad.

Astroboy

This movie was a computer animated take on the classic Astroboy anime.  Clearly aimed at kids, but enjoyable.  From what I can tell, it changed some elements of the story from the original, but still retained the basic premise: after his son is killed in an accident, a scientist builds a super-advanced robot with all his son’s memories as a replacement.  Needless to say, this doesn’t work out well for anyone involved, but Astroboy is born.

The movie had a bit of an environmental slant like Wall-E, and absolutely nonsensical science, but it wasn’t bad.  It was surprised that it showed some characters dying on screen, even if they were non-bloody deaths—I had thought that most films coddled kiddies more than that nowadays.  If you’re looking for a good kids movie, you could do worse than this.

Zombieland

I wrote about Zombieland briefly after I saw it, because it was just so much fun.  I do loves me some funny zombie-killing.  If you like zombies, and comedy, and don’t mind lots of gore, this movie is perfect.

Twilight: New Moon

I saw this with my girlfriend as atonement for taking her to Transformers 2.  I now consider that debt paid in full.  I mean, Transformers was still without a doubt the worst movie I saw this year, but Twilight: New Moon gives it a close run.  At least I didn’t spend my own money to see New Moon.

New Moon fails to entertain at every possible opportunity, and instead has vapid, uninterested actors spouting terrible, repetitive dialogue while they do absolutely nothing, and then external forces conspire to end the movie by essentially negating everything that did happen (which wasn’t much).  Terrible terrible terrible.

Ninja Assassin

Ninja Assassin is one of those titles, like Snakes on a Plane, that gives you a perfect idea of what the movie should contain.  You can quite readily know, when going to see a movie called Ninja Assasin, whether you are likely to enjoy it.  In that respect, you may consider me the target audience for Ninja Assassin.

Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed.  There were, indeed, some awesome action sequences, full of impossible martial arts and ridiculous gore.  But there was also a sort of storyline, and some superfluous characters that bogged the movie down.  There were parts where _minutes_ went by with no one being killed.  MINUTES!  I had been hoping for a movie like _Shoot ‘Em Up_, but with ninjas and swords instead of guns, but instead they actually had a bit of a plot.

Now, I likes me some plot.  It is my favourite thing.  I think my problem with it in Ninja Assassin was that it wasn’t interesting enough for me to accept it in lieu of non-stop over-the-top action.  The movie starts with a cool assination sequence, which sort of sets the bar.  When we switch away from ninjas, though, the plot better be DAMN GOOD to keep me satisfied, but I think it fell a little short here.

So, I liked Ninja Assassin.  I though the action sequences were pretty good.  The storyline was adequate—I mean, it made sense, and all—but it couldn’t match the action, and so the movie was uneven.  A decent enough action flick, but not one that I’d call “must-see”.

The Princess and the Frog

This movie marks Disney’s return to 2D animation, after they abandoned it in favour of 3D (thinking that was the secret to Pixar’s success).  After a number of notable 2D and 3D bombs, Disney has finally put out a decent movie again.

The animation is good, but I’ve seen just as good or better from Studio Ghibli and other Asian studios.  I enjoyed the jazzy soundtrack, although nothing stood out as especially memorable.  The characters, in a notable Disney first, were not entirely stereotypical: as an example, the spoiled, marriage-obsessed, self-involved daughter of the mayor turns out to be very generous and happy for her friend when she finds true love.  I was also suprised to see a main character killed, as in Astroboy, although this being Disney, perhaps they were returning to their roots in more ways than just going back to 2D animation.

Overall, this was a pretty good movie.  I’d recommend this one.

Avatar

James Cameron’s Avatar has been many years in the making, and has been getting lots of press.  Overall, it’s a very good movie, albeit a heavy-handed one.  The story is clunky and predictable, with absolutely no ambiguity or moral uncertainty about who is good and bad.

Much of acclaim has been accorded to the visuals.  I have to agree—the visual effects are among the best I’ve seen, with the aliens and their world seeming perfectly real to me, and blending nicely with the human actors.  I am less enamoured of the 3D nature of the showing I saw—I really don’t like the technology, and come out dizzy and disoriented, though sitting in the third row surely contributed to some of that.

The story concerns a Marine who essentially goes under cover with the natives of an alien planet to learn their ways.  Unfortunately, the alian culture seemed to be a mishmash of various First Nations and African tribal beliefs, rather than something truly alien, and the aliens were a little too human-looking for me to really view them as alien.

Anyway, as he becomes more involved with the alien culture, he puts himself at odds with the corporation and military group that want to move the aliens to mine some more “unobtainium” (we never learn why it’s valuable).  Wackiness ensues.

The cast is good, the visuals are great, and the story is kind of “meh”.  Still, definitely worth seeing, even at nearly 3 hours long.  I supsect I’ll prefer the non-3D version on DVD…

* * *

And that’s about it!  I think my favourite movie of the year was _Star Trek_, with honourable mentions (in no particular order) to _Ponyo_, _Zombieland_, _Coraline_, and _Moon_.  For 2010, I’ll try to be more on the ball with movie blogging.

First, I’d like to offer an apology to Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman.  I had thought that no two people could have less chemistry on screen than they did in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.  Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, however, have achieved new heights in visible disinterest in each other.  I can’t imagine any two people intoning “I love you” more apathetically than them.

Not that Stewart’s character, Bella, said much more than that.  Most of her dialogue consisted of “Please,”  “Don’t,” “Please don’t,” and “Don’t, please.”  She was completely and utterly useless throughout the entire movie.  When she was dumped, she moped for months.  MONTHS!  This was shown on screen in what felt like real time.  Then she starts leading on a guy who obviously has a crush on her, tries to kill herself a bunch of times so that she can remember her ex, and then runs off to Italy to save his unlife.   By showing up.  Not by doing anything active, god forbid, just by being there.

This movie was boring.  The pacing was slow, and I have no idea how the giant book it was based on still failed to provide any actual content for the movie.  All of the characters are completely stupid, and involved in self-destructive, abusive relationships with equally stupid people.  And nobody does anything—I haven’t seen so many characters going around and asking what they should do since The Matrix Reloaded.

Even the action was boring!  What could have been an awesome fight scene (where a werewolf pack hunted down what was apparently a recurring vampire villain from the first movie) became instead some running and later, a 1-second bit of flashback.

Leaving aside the ridiculous nature of the “world” of Twilight (sparkly, nigh-indestructible vampires with no meaningful consequences to becoming undead), this was more like a bad romantic comedy than a drama—minus any romance or comedy.  The way it was filmed did nothing to improve the source material either—the one scene of vampire Bella and Edward frolicking through the woods in Alice’s vision provoked laughter from everyone in attendance, whether they were buying into the rest of the material or not.

This was just not a good movie.  However, at least I went in with low expectations, and so I still came out less angry than after seeing Transformers 2.  It may have helped that the girlfriend bought the tickets, so I didn’t spend my own money on it.  But honestly, I can barely imagine that the fans of the books could enjoy this movie, much less anyone who has to take it on its own merits.  And still it did huge box office business.  It’s enough to make a guy cry.

It’s the sort of ridiculous, over-the-top movie that I quite enjoy.  It takes most of the well-worn zombie-movie tropes and exploits them to the logical, silly extreme.  It is wall-to-wall funny, but poignant and sweet in places.  It also has a most excellent cameo appearance that I don’t want to ruin for anyone.

That said, while the movie is generally upbeat about life after the end of civilization as we know it, the happy ending is still kind of depressing, because we all know that, really, there’s no happy ending out there.  There’s just not dying and having friends.

One of the bits I did enjoy was Columbus (the male lead) explaining his rules for survival in Zombieland.  The rules themselves were both funny AND sensible, and reminded me of Gibbs’ Rules from NCIS.  Perhaps I’ll try to synthesize them all into my own personal set of rules for living.

Anyway, as long as you don’t mind violence and gore, this movie should entertain.

I left it to my girlfriend to pick the shows, and we ended up going to two of them—one a regular screening, and one a gala premiere.  I’ll talk about them both below.

Timetrip: The Curse of the Viking Witch

This film was a children’s movie from Denmark, and as such, was a subtitled film.  The director was at the showing, and held a Q&A after.  He seemed nice enough, and gave good answers to the questions.  (I think my girlfriend chose this because she is a medievalist, and feels the need to pass judgment on all movie that intersect with that time period.)

The movie itself was a fairly conventional children’s adventure, where a high school guy and his younger sister, travel through time to help a cursed immortal find an artifact lost hundreds of years ago.  They end up in several different times during Denmark’s history, and wackiness ensues.

It was actually pretty good, for the kind of movie it was.  I was entertained, although I found little surprising or unexpected.  There was danger, a surprising amount of violence that was sort of glossed over, a little bit of character development, and a happy ending.  The kids in the theatre seemed to pay close attention, too, so I guess it worked for them.

Anyway, apart from a few introductions before the screening, and the Q&A after, nothing really set this apart from any other movie viewing.  So, in that respect, TIFF elicited a bit of a “meh” from me.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

The second show we had tickets to was the North American gala premiere of Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  This movie is notable for two reasons—director Terry Gilliam, and star Heath Ledger.  Filming was partially completed when Ledger died last summer; actors Colin Farrell, Jude Law, and Johnny Depp stepped up finish the film in his place, lending a lot of star power to the movie.  (I suspect the possibility that any of those men might be at the premiere was the primary motivation for my girlfriend and her roommates getting tickets to this showing over any other.)

We were told to arrive at least an hour before showtime; we got there an hour and a half early, and found ourselves at the midpoint of the line.  This line was at the back entrance of the building, far from the red carpet entry where the celebrities would arrive.  We waited for over an hour before the opened the doors.  Needless to say, I was not exactly thrilled with this setup, but my company in the line was good, and so it passed pleasantly enough.

The venue for this was Roy Thomson Hall, a concert hall with two levels of balconies.  Naturally, the floor seats were for celebrities and special guests; I suspect the second tier was for people who bought the expensive tickets.  We were exiled to the third balcony, but at least we had an unobstructed view.

They were screen the red carpet coverage from outside while we waited for things to get underway.  The ladies in our party were appropriately devastated at the lack of Ledger/Depp/Farrell/Law, but we did get Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, and director Terry Gilliam himself, among others.  There were all introduced before the show, and Gilliam spoke a few words before the movie began.

And, well, that was basically it.  The movie was good, and very Gilliam-esque.  The handling of the Ledger/Depp/Farrell/Law substitutions was masterful, and made perfect sense in the context of the movie—at least, as much as anything in a Gilliam movie makes sense.  It was imaginative, and odd, with sometimes likable characters and sometimes not so much.  I suspect it will do well for Gilliam once it is in full release.

But, when it was over, it was over.  And from the “nosebleed” seats, the presence of the cast and production team still seemed so distant and removed that it was little different than watching them speak on TV.  So—much like arena concerts—the experience was good, but I suspect I would have found it more exciting if I were closer to the action.  But as it was, the “gala premiere” really felt little different than any other movie, except with colder popcorn.

So, I got to see a good movie by a director I like several months before its general release, which was cool and all, but I just don’t understand the excitement people associate with TIFF.  At least it’s something I can cross off my list of things to do in Toronto.