Moonage Webdream

Moonlet is now getting old enough to sort of somewhat understand movie plots.  I stress the “sort of”.  As such, our movie experiences are expanding into more adult oriented stuff.  Not movies with drugs, violence, sex, excessive profanity, or complicated boring plots.  But, the other stuff.  That doesn’t leave a whole lot.  It did however, leave room for The Day The Earth Stood Still.  Now, I had always been a fan of the original The Day The Earth Stood Still.  I figured it would be something like the original.  Kinda hokey, kinda goofy, kinda fun in an overly serious way.  I really thought Keanu Reeves, who made his biggest mark with this expression for three entire movies:
 

Would make a perfect Klaatu.  And, it was pretty much what I expected.  For the entire movie, he held this expression:

Being as Klaatu was an alien and unexperienced with emotions apparently, Keanu was a perfect fit.

That was the only thing perfect about this version of the classic.

The UFO’s everyone has learned to be so suspicious of have been transformed to blobs.  The main character has been transformed into an ordinary college professor.  The crux of the movie has been transformed into an omission of such epic proportions it derails the entire movie.  I mean, who has watched televion and never seen emotion?  They know everything about mankind, have been watching us for a thousand years or so, and did know we care about each other?  Give me a freaking break.  Toss in Klaatu actually saving people so they can be eaten by the robot bugs and you’ve got yet another groan.  Then the little things start getting annoying like the big blob being completely impervious to any missile, bomb, or anything man can toss at it.  However, the smaller version of a blob is easily destroyed with a blowtorch.  I won’t even groan about how it ends.  Let’s just say, it’s sudden.  I kind of got the feeling the director knew he had made a bomb and just wanted it over.

This movie just does not make any sense.  The original did.  If you want to enjoy The Day The Earth Stood Still, get the original.

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The Moonlet and I went to see Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.  I really didn’t like it much.  The humor was not well suited for small kids.  There was a lot of stuff about relationships, between a father and son, between rivals, between suitors, etc..  Kids just don’t get that at five to six years old and made for a lot of fidgeting.  Sure, there were some funny scenes, but that just made for temporary lapses in an otherwise too involved movie to be a cartoon for kids.  As bad as I hated sitting through High School Musical 3, both the boy and I enjoyed it more.  The only consolation to seeing this movie was Moonlet ran into one of his best friends and they had a blast being with each other.  I however, was not so lucky and had to rely on the movie for entertainment.  That didn’t happen.  As for doing something with the kids, doing anything with the kid is a good thing.  That is the only redeeming quality about seeing this movie with the kid.  He didn’t suggest we see it again either.

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Following the disaster of trying to see City of Ember on Friday, Moonlet and I tried again Sunday.  This is what we got:

That really is about as exciting as 99% of the movie got.  The action scene at the end lasts about ten seconds.  This folks, is NOT what you want to take a fidgety five year old boy to see.  He asked questions and changed seats all through the movie trying to keep himself occupied while the movie just drug on from one boring scene to the next.  It has a lot of adult issues and fairly complicated plot angles.  This just doesn’t do anything for a pre-teen, and needless to say, if the kid’s not happy at a kid movie, neither is the parent.

Skip it.  Take your chances on High School Musical 3, it’s better.  As an adult, you won’t enjoy either to any degree.  However, at least with the latter, the kid will be occupied for 90 minutes or so which to me is worth the matinee ticket price.

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Friday night kinda got screwed up for me.  I had decided I wanted to see City of Ember with the boy.  I was kind of leary of this decision, but there was nothing else on for a kid here other than High School Musical 3, which I absolutely did not want to see at all.  Going back as far as Grease, I have always hated cheesy young girl oriented musicals.  So, that was not an option.  We got there, and when ordering the tickets, was informed the paper had screwed up, it was not showing at that time.  So, I panicked and started scanning the other movies real quick, trying to justify taking him to some R rated movie or something.  I had promised to take him to a movie, just hadn’t promised which one for sure.  About that time, a little girl comes up to Moonlet and asks him if he’s seeing a movie, he says he is.  She tells him he needs to see High School Musical with her.  He says he is. So, guess what daddy got to watch.

Yup, High School Musical 3.  For me, it was quite painful.  Every teen cliche, every sappy emotion explored, no cultural or social overtones, nothing for an adult mind to grab onto.  Nothing.  The girls looked like teen girls, the guys looked even younger.  Nothing.  My Friday night was shot to Hades.  Although I was rather despondent about spending a Friday night at a teen girl flick, the boy was quite content, I think mostly by simply being with a school friend and lots of other five to ten year olds.  So I tried to use that to keep my spirits up.  It failed for the most part.  He was happy and having a good time, I was watching time ooze by with lines and scenes I was forced to suffer through thirty years ago.  The movie ended not soon enough for me, there really is nothing to recommend about this movie other than its safe mindless fluff fit for five to ten year old girls.  We left quickly.

When I got home, I was welcomed by a scene something like this:

Taking the boy to see High School Musical 3 didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.

Technorati Tags: high school musical 3, movie, movie review, Parenting

Sometimes bad ideas I think are so bad that no one has the guts to tell the creator of the really bad idea that it truly is that bad of an idea.  In order to be nice, they say nice things about the really bad idea.  That just keeps the really bad idea going and going.  Case in point:

Rose McGowan May Play ‘Deep Throat’ Star Linda Lovelace

OK, this has potential.  Now, for those of you my age, Linda Lovelace has a place in history of our, let’s say, youth.  It wasn’t so much that Linda Lovelace was smokin hot:
 

She really wasn’t.  It was that she had a talent that every man coveted.  And, it was sort of the the first main stream movie to display talents like she had.  Flash forward past her porn career, she was everything most men avoid.  She was a rabid feminist, often denouncing the very talents she taught the world how to use correctly.

Flash forward now past her death in 2002.  Rose McGowan, a fun and fairly smokin actress:

Is talking about making a movie about Linda Boreman.  Not so much about the talents of Ms. Boreman, but the life of Ms. Boreman.

I really don’t think that many people are that interested in the life of Ms. Boreman.  I do think a lot of people would be a lot more interested to see how Rose could compete with Ms. Lovelace’s talents.  But, that’s not in the works that I am aware of.  This would be about Boreman’s brief movie career, he turn to activism, etc. etc. etc..

Bad plan.

What really makes this fun for me is this idea replaces another idea that may or may not go anywhere ( I bet not ):

UPDATE: October 28, 2008: The director of Deep Throat passed away Saturday. Gerard Damiano was 80. Apparently he never thought his masterpiece was much of a movie. However, more than thirty years after its creation, people are apparently still talking about it. And, the phrase coined by the movie became synonymous with federal corruption. Rather than making a movie about Linda Lovelace, I really think a movie about Deep Throat would be a lot more interesting.

Technorati Tags: activism, bad idea, barbarella, deep throat, feminist, gerard damiano, jane-fonda, linda boreman, linda lovelace, rose mcgowan, talents

Took Moonlet to see Igor yesterday.  Now, we’ve got two cinemas in town.  One’s pretty new and OK, the other one’s a dump.  We had gone to ride the Big South Fork Scenic Railway again, so I drove about thirty minutes to another town to watch it in their big nice cinema since this one was on at the dump.

It really felt like a wasted trip.  Other than spending some quality time with the boy, the movie was disappointing.  It just never seemed to click.  It seemed confused.  It’s definitely a cartoon, with cute little people and animals and robots ( sorta ), but then it tosses in enough gore and violence to merit it a PG rating.  A lot of the humor is based on violence and gore.  I just didn’t feel like it was appropriate for a five year old.  According to the rating, it’s not.  However, I am a guy who took his five year old to Tropic Thunder and felt fine about that.  And, I’m quite certain he enjoyed it more as well.

I’m not going to spoil the movie though. There’s no point in it.  It just basically ends.

The only thing I would admit to half-way enjoying was the over-sized and over-obvious boobs on the Nordic babe ( which turns out not to be what you think she is, of course ).

Bottom line, no thumbs for any age group.  It’s too childish to be fun for adults, and too adult to be fun for small kids.

Technorati Tags: cartoon, gore, igor, movie review, tropic thunder, violence

I read the previews to this movie and decided to skip it.  Not enough time had passed for me to get completely over Meet The Spartans, which I liked.  Now, Meet The Spartans, along with any of the other Scary Movies, didn’t require much thought.  They all required knee jerk reactions to puns and pratfalls.  However, when I saw the preview, the first thought that went through my mind was, “A five year old would love this.”  Just so happens, I have a five year old.  So, we went.

Now, the critics are right for the most part.  If you don’t really enjoy the movies they poke at, you won’t get much of the humor.  If you do like the movies they poke at, you might get it.  I got it.  I thought many lines and visuals were funny.  Not side-splitting, but pleasantly fun.  And, I had to put up with scenes like this all night:

Obviously, I was able to grin and bear it while the five year old hooted and hollered at the rabid chipmunks and people being splattered by falling rocks. 

I think the directors missed their target audience on this one.  If it’s for adults, we need nudity and adult oriented themes.  If it’s for kids, which this one seems to be due to the content, we need no profanity, which this movie could have done just as well without.  It just really seemed confused in what it set out to entertain.  Not too many adults really enjoyed Alvin and the Chipmunks enough to really enjoy seeing them roasted in this one.

All in all, no thumbs for this one.  But, if you have an open mind and a five year old, it’s worth one visit to the cinema and seeing your kid laugh.   One visit.  Matinee only.

Technorati Tags: alvin and the chipmunks, carmen-electra, disaster-movie, kim-kardashian, movie review, scary movies

Me and Moonlet went to see Clone Wars again yesterday.  I really don’t get this movie at all.  For starters:

Clone Wars

Why does Skywalker look more robotic than the robots?  Some humans looked even worse.  Now, I know this is a cartoon, but just a little effort would have made a lot of difference.  It just annoyed me.  Especially when you looked at the aliens as well.  For some reason, with this bunch, humans apparently fell at the bottom of the attention for detail.  Then there were all kinds of plot lapses that were annoying.  I mean, especially the force field scene.  What’s with that?  They fight and fight and fight it, and then it just passes right over everyone.  I mean, come on!

All in all, this is a bad movie.  This is not at all what a Star Wars movie is all about.  Lucas, next time, either make a movie or don’t even try.  This is just knocking the Star Wars franchise down a few notches.  Especially when you’re getting beat to death at the box office by Ben Stiller and a movie about a pinup girl.  And, justifiably so.

This, is what I expect from a Star Wars movie:

Bottom line, no thumbs. Skip it. Rent or buy the originals.

Technorati Tags: clone wars, george lucas, movie, review, star-wars

After seeing plenty of sneaks about this movie, I decided I had to see it.  I was not disappointed.

This folks, is the best movie of the 21st century.

This was the first time I spit my drink through my nose probably since Pulp Fiction.

Tropic Thunder delivers MANY lines that will be remembered for a long time.  Possibly one of the best lines, not coincedentally, is delivered by Tom Cruise and is taken directly from, you guessed it, Pulp Fiction.

But the absolute stealer of this show is Robert Downey Jr.  The lines Stiller gives him to work with are classics.

A lot was made by the mental health associations for mocking people with learning disabilities.  That does happen.  However, in the context of what’s happening, it’s appropriate.  And, it feeds Downey my favorite lines of the entire movie.  And, in context of the entirety of the movie, they should feel relieved.  Other groups I can think of who should be offended would include:

• PETA, for very obvious reasons.
• Vietnamese
• whoever is supposed to be offended by child abuse
• whoever is supposed to be offended by conributing to the delinquency of minors.
• gays
• anyone who is offended by the presence of Tom Cruise.
• whoever liked Risky Business
• whoever is offended by drug abuse
• whoever is offended by excessive gore
• whoever is offended by canabalism
• NAACP should have been, but they seem to enjoy the movie as well

The list just goes on and on.  Nothing is spared.  Toss in some big booms, lots of guns, some helicopters, a dose of midget wrestling/karate, and you’ve got the makings of a testosterone classic.  Toss in Matthew McConnaughey to keep the wives happy.  The only thing missing in this movie, was overt female nudity.  Given Jennifer Love Hewiit’s recent epiphony that she should have been naked for the last fifteen years, she wasted the perfect chance to unleash the shame she’s been bearing.  However, it just didn’t really matter all that much.  This movie played about every other card known to man, and pulled it off flawlessly.

I’m serious folks, this is the best movie of the last ten years to me.  It’s a classic.  I truly can not believe Ben Stiller had anything to do with this.  It’s just that good.

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We went to see The Dark Knight last night.  I’ll tell you what.  I’ve not been a fan of the Batman movie series at all.  I’ve seen most of them, but even with all the big booms and fights, they bore me.  Everything’s grey, everyone talks in monotone, everthing’s serious.  Now, I grew up with the Adam West Batman, so I liked the campy Batman a lot more.  Which I think is a big part of the appeal of Heath Ledger’s Joker.  For folks like me, he’s the teaser that maybe, just maybe, this comic book encarnation of Batman might just go back to what WE loved most.  I doubt that will happen, but using Mike Myers as the next Batman should be an idea.  My commission rate is minimal.

The movies itself is a roller-coaster ride that I will admit took a lot more turns than I expected.  All but one of the turns made sense and kept the movie moving at an almost chaotic pace.  The characters that survive evolve in ways you see coming ( especially Aaron Eckhart’s ), and some you don’t.  In other words, there is nothing predictable about the end of the movie.  It’s an excellent plot sans one jumping of the shark that kind of let me down because the rest of the plot was so well developed.

We took our five year old boy with us given our experience with previous Batman movies.  That really wasn’t a good idea for the most part.  Now, it didn’t really have anyhing that would leave him scarred for life, but it did make me as a parent squirm a little bit.  That’s a distraction I don’t like to have to deal with when I watch a movie.  It’s rated PG-13, I suggest following that advice.  ( At the very least, PG-10 or so. )

Bottom line, I was pleasantly surprised how much I did enjoy The Dark Knight.  It is hugely better than the previous installments.  All thumbs up on this one!

Technorati Tags: aaron eckhart, batman, christian bale, heath ledger, Movies, Parenting, the dark knight