Before Wall-E came out, I thought the robot was a ripoff of Johnny 5 for kids too young to remember Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2. After seeing the movie though, I can admit that I was wrong… the good thing is that I am not usually this glad to be wrong about something. There were also some great nods to classic science fiction and technology fans, with callbacks to 2001: A Space Oddyssey and the classic Mac startup chime, to just name a couple.
I consider myself a jaded New Yorker and that’s why I was so surprised to be emotionally knocked on my ass for many scenes in this film. I even teared up during some of the scenes between Wall·E and Eve (the slick white robot that resembles ASIMO), which was the most surprising thing for me. I was NOT expecting to be hit so hard by the love story and the ability of Pixar’s animators to imbue that much emotion into robots that say less than 5 words to one another.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film though was the first 40 or so minutes of the film on Earth, first with WALL·E alone and then with Eve. This was some of the best pantomime since Charlie Chaplain and what really moved me was the interaction between WALL·E and Eve reminded me of Chaplain’s City Lights. I liked the juxtaposition between Fred Willard’s live action scenes from the past and the animated humans who are now blubberous blobs of laziness and a shell of their ancestors, played to a tee with voicework from Jeff GarlinJohn Ratzenberger and Kathy Najimy.
This movie is a definate must see, even the silent animated short with a hungry bunny and an obnoxious magician was entertaining to watch and I know I’m going to be looking for this movie when it is finally released on dvd. Thanks to MoviePatron for the above pic.
I’ve been waiting a while to see Hancock, but I was very surprised with what I got with this movie. I HATE it when the trailers reveal too much about the plot of films, especially when they reveal the film’s final scene, battle or closing explosion.
It turned out that the trailers for Hancock really didn’t reveal anything about the plot and that was refreshing. I didn’t even realize, going into the film that Charlize Theron was in the cast. I don’t usually like her, but I loved her character in this film and I thought she gave a great performance that I didn’t expect at all. I’ve never really been attracted to her, but she has never been more beautiful than in this film in my opinion.
Jason Bateman plays a struggling public relations agent who has taken up the task of pitching an idea that no big company wants anything to do with and it was fun just watching Bateman pitching his absurd, yet hopeful ideas.
Then, there’s Will Smith as Hancock. The film opens with him being woken up by a little kid (Atticus Shaffer) who tries to get him to dispatch some criminals, only for Hancock to blow him off because of his hangover and the kid calls him an asshole, a name he really doesn’t enjoy being called. He ends up saving the day, but at a definite cost to the city. This paves the way for us, the audience to see what we’ve got in store for us.
It’s only after Hancock saves Jason Bateman and Bateman tries to pitch a new image for Hancock that things start to change… slowly. I’m not going to reveal any more of the plot, but I must say, this was a fun movie.
The problem is that there really wasn’t anything special about this film. It was a fun summer movie, but not so much so that it was memorable for anything in particular. This may have been director Peter Berg’s fault. The movie wasn’t filmed in a great way and there are some scenes and dialogue that could have been cut down a bit, but there aren’t many bad things to say about the film.
One thing I did notice from the trailers was that there was a lot of talk about Hancock, the hero that no one wants because he brings with him chaos and destruction along with his “help,” but there was never any mention of an enemy for him to grapple with… after watching the film, I can see why, there really were no interesting baddies in this film. There was a main villain, it is just that it wasn’t very satisfying watching Hancock face the film’s big bad… although, it was fun watching the irony in how the big bad was ultimately defeated.
I love watching Jackie Chan, especially when he seems to lose his mind and do some crazy stunt that you just can’t believe a person could survive, like falling over 50 feet from a clock tower. You also have to love watching his drunken boxing style in Drunken Master and Legend of Drunken Master.
After what I thought was a TERRIBLE marketing campaign during the runup to Kung Fu Panda’s release, it took me a while to actually bring myself to the theater to see it. It wasn’t until I saw some of the previews for Tropic Thunder, another movie starring Jack Black, that I got excited to see this film. Below is that promo.
Now that I’ve seen the film, I wish I had gone sooner. This was easily the best Jack Black film to date, with King Kong and School of Rock trailing behind. One of the best moments comes right at the beginning of the film where the first style of animation we see transitions to the film’s main animation style. The way it was done was stunning. It made it very hard to tell that the style transitioning to was animation at all! I was very impressed.
The story was a lot of fun, a definite winner of a kids movie. There really weren’t any adult wink wink nudge nudge moments, but the movie was hilarious so I didn’t mind at all. There were some reviewers *cough* Filmspotting.net (subscribe here)*cough* that thought it was unwise to portray the Chinese villagers as yellow buck toothed bunnies, but I didn’t find it to be offensive or in bad taste in any way. When I was looking for this, I found that in actuality, the villagers were really represented by a few different animals: bunnies, pigs and birds. So I felt this was a real non issue. Seriously though, if you want some great movie reviews, check out Filmspotting.
I really think that if you want to just go in to see a film and spend the majority of the time laughing, this is an easy choice for a film to go see.
Watch as a brave voodoo doll tries to save its fellow voodoo dolls from harm. If you can, try and check out the high quality version to get a feel for some of the amazing detail work that went into this!
Enjoy a visually stunning 4 minutes created using Maya and After Effects.
I was hoping that the Sex and the City movie would be that holdover. I enjoyed the television show, but I can’t say I’m a part of its rabid fan base. So, the advantage for me was that I knew all about these 4 women going into the film…
After watching the movie, I felt that it held pretty true to the television show and would satisfy the film’s built in fan base. It felt like 3 or 4 episodes of the television show back-to-back. After telling the person I saw the movie with this, I realized that this may not be such a good thing after all.
The film didn’t just feel like 3 or 4 episodes of the show, it felt like the film ran long, with these episodes just tacked onto the back of each other, instead of a tight continuously flowing story.
The next realization I had was there was very little setup for the main characters (and why the casual viewer should care about these 4 relatively well off women). Now, for someone like me, who knows these four strong ladies very well from their tv escapades, this was not a problem, but what about for someone who has either never seen the tv show or has only seen a handful of episodes? Well, these people just get a quick (~2min) video recap of the tv series laying out the history of the characters and a voice over by Sarah Jessica Parker to go with it and my guess is that this will leave the uninitiated confused and in the lurch.
Even with these misgivings and the fact that there were times when I felt the film was just a bit long, I DID enjoy the movie, there were a handful of unexpectedly funny moments, Charlotte’s troubles during international travel being one of them (a point I disagree with my favorite reviewer, Roger Ebert on). I feel like for those people who are NYers, New Yorkophiles or fans of the tv show, you should definitely go out and see this film (especially if you’re planning on pre-gaming with a Cosmo or two), but if you’ve never really seen the show or know the characters, you’d be better off not initiating yourself to this world with this film, just go back and rent/borrow/buy the dvds of the original series.
MUTO is an amazing visual experience. This short film by Blu was created using stop motionanimation in Buenos Aires to painstakingly create this 7min short film. I’ll let the film speak for itself, just check it out.
There are currently only 3 excerpts (1, 2, 3) available and some movie stills, but this is an interesting project that you should check out. I can’t wait to see what the final 2 hour movie will be like.
Enjoy
Dany
I would give credit to where I heard about this art project from, but for the life of me I can not remember which podcast mentioned it recently. If anybody knows, can you leave a comment or email me about it, I feel bad not attributing where I found out about this from.
After watching the movie, there are a few interesting things of note. I was worried thinking about seeing Harrison Ford (65 years old) as Indy again, but from the first scene, when he picks up his hat, he just exudes Indy. My only problem with Indy was best stated by Alex Albrecht on The Totally Rad Show (subscribe here) when he wished they hadn’t turned Indy into an invincible superhero and I completely agreed with that sentiment after the refrigerator scene. Another issue I had was with the heavy handed use of CGI… especially unnecessary/bad CGI.
The movie was definitely fun to watch (how can Indy NOT be fun to watch?), but the movie wasn’t exciting, there were no real edge of your seat moments. There were times when it felt more like I was watching The Da Vinci Code, Sherlock Holmes or National Treasure, than Indiana Jones which was disappointing.
Even with all that going against it, I still had a good time at the theater, but the person I saw it with fell asleep a couple of times (remember that not exciting quality I mentioned earlier?). I did love watching how Spielberg was able to create an incredibly violent movie, but because most of the gun violence takes place off camera, it seems like a much lighter movie than it really is, it always amazes me just how effective leaving things to your imagination is for a film maker, instead of showing every bit of violence and gore possible,
After loving the movieJuno, finding this movie trailer spoof called Jewno, just made me laugh. I can’t believe they got J.K. Simmons to help with this, he’s one of my favorite niche actors. Also, the 92nd st Y mug was a nice touch.
I originally found it on Funny or Die because of the GREAT podcast The 404 (subscribe here), which I am extremely backlogged with this podcast (I’m 2 months behind), so I gotta go try and catch up now.
Every year the summer brings us blockbuster movies which is like Christmas for the movie studios because these are the movies that tend to bring in LOTS of money for the studios and this year it looks like Christmas came early for the film industry.
First off, let me say, if you love the summer blockbuster, especially if you’re a Marvel fan, just STOP reading this and get your butt to the theater and STAY THROUGH THE END OF THE CREDITS(!!!), you don’t need to read what I have to say other than that this movie will rock your pants off. I can’t tell you how many people walked out of the theater before seeing probably one of the best credit cookies I can remember and sets up the sequel perfectly.
OK, now that the fanboys and people who I KNOW will love this movie no matter what are gone… onto the review:
Robert Downey Jr. gets the prize roll of the film, he plays Tony Stark and gets to essentially have fun drinking, tooling away as a mechanic/builder, womanizing and just flat out have fun for two thirds of the film and I LOVED every minute of it. Jon Favreau directed the film and has a fun cameo as Stark’s driver/bodyguard and Gwyneth Paltrow plays the spicy Pepper Potts. I couldn’t believe it, I was surprised when I heard that Paltrow was cast in this movie, but after seeing the scenes and banter between her and Downey Jr. it reminded me of one of my favorite on screen relationships: Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant from the hilarious His Girl Friday.
The only real problem with the film was seeing The Dude playing Obadiah Stane and from the very first moment we see him on screen, we know exactly what’s going to happen with this character, now I am not terribly familiar with this character from the comics, but unless Bridges was trying to match the look of the original character, I think this was a bad choice that ultimately hurt the suspense of the film.
I have to say though, this is the superhero origin story that we’ve never gotten before, this film is just a joy to watch. Most times, we need to wade through an origin story (Spider-Man), just to get to the movie we were hoping for (Spider-Man 2). The only other origins story I really enjoyed was one that completely broke the mold for this type of film, Unbreakable from M. Night Shyamalan, which has a secret connection to Iron Man which you’ll only understand if you watch through the end credits.
I also enjoyed some of the little things that Favreau and the writers put into the the film. I grew up with a family that spoke Arabic (a language that I never learned), but watching this film I recognized a lot of very familiar Arabic slang and it was something that I totally wasn’t expecting, not to mention that when I saw that the prisoners in the film passed the time playing backgammon, it made my eyes light up with joy.
There are very few directors whose new movies I actively seek out, but David Mamet has been on that small list ever since he came out with Glengarry Glen Ross.
The movie stars Chiwetel Ejiofor (a man I’ve been on the lookout for ever since he played the big bad in Serenity), Tim Allen and Joe Mantegna and Mamet crafts an interesting tale of honor in a world that seems to have it in short supply. The story takes place around the world of Jiu-Jitsu.
Ejiofor plays the instructor and proprietor of a Jiu-Jitsu school and he gets sucked into a world of sticky ethical situations, sometimes with honorable and other times despicable people and it takes some time to figure out who is who, but with Mamet’s amazing dialog, scenes that would normally be rushed are filmed with care and scenes that seem like they are going to be cliche, end up surprising you.
This is not an amazing movie, but it was an interesting study of honor among today’s characteristic shades of gray in life and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Regardless of the inspiration though, Jason Calacanis and Mahalo are very smart, they use Youtube (the most famous video sharing site) to distribute their videos because they understand that youtube (and sites like it) can be use be a great free distribution method for their videos, which serves as amazing FREE advertising. If Mahalo had stuck to a proprietary video distribution method, like many sites have tried, it would make it that much harder for people to get to see their vidos and also to get people to try searching with Mahalo’s human powered search.
The fans love him so much that the great people at The Dented Helmet and RebelScum got together and built him a replica of his original Boba Fett suit of Mandalorian armor. This is a fun look at the group presenting him with their hard work.
Lastly, we have Righteous Kill, which is only the 3rd movie starring both Al Pacino and Robert De Niro (Godfather II and Heat) and only the second with the two acting together on screen (Heat). I don’t know how good it will be, but just having the two on screen together gets me interested in seeing it (get the HD trailer here from Apple Trailers).
One of my favorite movies is Punch-Drunk Love, it is by far the best (and most out of character) performances by Adam Sandler. One of the best parts of this film though (for me) is the song on the soundtrack, He Needs Me. What I didn’t know about it though, was that the recording of the song in the film was lifted from the 1980 movie, Popeye, with Shelley Duvall performing the song. It makes me want to get Popeye, even though I have heard that it was not very good and even hurt Robert Altman’s career.
I saw the trailer for the Mamma Mia! movie last time I went to the movies. Now, I didn’t have any idea what the Broadway musical, that this film is based on, was about… actually, my only knowledge of it comes solely from this poster:
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