Desert Solitaire (book review)

Book review from The Movie Snob

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, by Edward Abbey (1968). I had never heard of this book until a recent vacation in Utah, and then I seemed to see it in every bookstore and read about it in every guidebook. If I remember right, Abbey was a ranger for the National Park Service in 1957 and 1958, and he spent those summers at Arches National Monument in southeastern Utah. This book is about his experience as a ranger in the summer of 1957, and I thought it was a very interesting read. Abbey was clearly a person of strong feelings; he loved the desert and hated what he called "industrial tourism." In this book he calls for much greater protection for our national parks, and specifically for rules banning all motor vehicles in those parks. If you want to go in, ride a bike or a horse, or walk. He waxes philosophical a lot, and he espouses something he refers to as hedonistic paganism. He has nothing good to say about Christianity in its mainstream or Mormon varieties, although he does admire the Mormons' pioneer spirit. It's an easy read, and a great accompaniment to a trip through Utah's vast wildernesses. I recommend it.

Moon

Yet another new review from Movie Man Mike!

Moon (A-). This film is a definite "must see" for Sci-fi fans. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) has a 3-year contract with a Helium mining company, and he's got two more weeks to go before his contract is up. He's the sole occupant of an outpost on the moon, and it's his job to keep the mining machines in operation. As the end of his contract term nears, he discovers that one of the mining machines has stopped operating, so he goes out in his lunar rover to investigate and discovers that another lunar rover has crashed into the mining machine. Upon further investigation, he discovers that the unconscious person inside the crashed rover is him. That's when things get really interesting. Rockwell is terrific as Sam Bell. There's an interactive computer on board and the voice is that of Kevin Spacey. While I thought the voice was a good one, it was a little distracting knowing that it was Kevin Spacey's voice. The computer was reminiscent of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The story here is entertaining and seemed somehow familiar to me but I can't place my finger on why. If you don't see this in the theater, you definitely should consider renting it.

Public Enemies

Movie Man Mike provides a new movie review

Public Enemies (B). For a two-and-a-half-hour film, I wouldn't expect to find myself wanting more when it was over, but I did want more. Maybe not more footage, but more story. Backstory, to be precise. This is the story of John Dillinger, who is played by Johnny Depp. The action in this film is solid. The film is loaded with big-name actors, but it's the background of the characters depicted that's missing. You don't get much of a sense of the characters' history, motivation, or personality from the portions of the stories told. Also, I didn't get a good feel for how much time the story occurred over, whether it was a matter of months or years. One weakness in my view was Christian Bale's character. Bale plays FBI Agent Melvin Purvis, whose job it is to hunt down Dillinger. Unfortunately, Bale seems to be stuck in "Batman" mode. He's still got that whispered growl he used as the caped crusader. I'm not sure what's up with that. Anyway, the film was entertaining, but one that I wished I had waited to see as a rental.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

DVD review from Movie Man Mike

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (B+). What a haunting story this was. Actor David Thewlis is a commandant of a Nazi concentration camp. He moves his family from the city to the country to be near the concentration camp. And then he tries to protect them from the horrors of what goes on at the concentration camp by keeping the information from them. His son, Bruno, is a curious and innocent child, who secretly befriends one of the inhabitants of the concentration camp, a Jewish boy. As Bruno's mother slowly learns details of what goes on at the concentration camp, her relationship to Bruno's father sours and she decides it's better to take the children and get away from it. But maybe she acts too late to save them. In the end, the story makes a powerful statement about the dangers and horrors of keeping secrets to ensure the innocence of those we love. I wanted to see this in the theaters, but didn't get to see it until it left. I am glad that I took the chance to see it as a rental.

State of Play

A new review from The Bleacher Bum

State of Play: Political thrillers are a huge genre with nonfiction books. However, there have not been many political thrillers as movies in recent years. State of Play is a big budget movie that focuses on Capitol Hill, mega-corporations, and the relationship between politicians and the press. The movie is based on the 6-part British television serial of the same name.

Russell Crowe is a superstar investigative reporter in D.C. working for a newspaper that is in the process of being bought. Ben Affleck is an up-and-coming congressman from Pennsylvania that is chairman of a military spending committee. Rachel McAdams works for the newspaper as the on-line gossip columnist. Robin Penn-Wright is Affleck's wife. Crowe's, Affleck's and Penn-Wright's characters were good friends in college. Helen Mirren is Crowe's and McAdams' editor. Mirren gives an award-winning performance as a boss that is being pulled in a thousand directions that wants to do the just thing and get the story right.

The good congressman is having an affair with one of his staffers, until she is murdered. Crowe and McAdams uncover the story and learn that many influential people and companies are involved. The story and dialogue are very good. The director did a very good job. The story covered a lot of angles, but was constantly moving, twisting and turning. Crowe and Penn-Wright were extraordinary in their roles. McAdams and Affleck were good, but they seemed a little outmatched when they shared the screen with Crowe and Penn-Wright.

Bleacher Bum Movie Scale: Homerun, Triple, Double, Single, Strikeout

State of Play: Triple that just beats the throw from right field

The Proposal and Tyson

That Guy Named David surfaces with two new reviews

The Proposal (C-)

I propose that no one go watch this movie. Plot: guy (Ryan Reynolds; most famous for marrying Scarlett Johansson) works for witch of a boss (Sandra Bullock; famous despite lack of acting ability and marriage to motorcycle repairman Jesse James), she finds out she is going to be deported to Canada, she makes him act like her fiance, they go to Alaska to see his family, they fall in love, Michael Jackson dies. Okay, the last part probably has nothing to do with the movie; although, I think there was a point where I was wishing I would come down with a serious illness so I could get out of the movie. Seriously though, there is nothing redeeming about the movie. Bullock plays the exact same role she plays in every other movie, Reynolds was more convincing (and more entertaining) as Van Wilder, and while I admit to getting a kick out of reruns of The Golden Girls, the inclusion of Betty White in the cast fell flat for everyone in the theatre under the age of 65. Save your money. Wait until it is picked up by TBS.

Tyson (A-)

In my humble opinion, there is little in cinema that outshines a good documentary. Unlike the originator of this website, who enjoys documentaries on birds, penguins and watching paint dry, I prefer my documentaries to be about cultural icons (Bob Dylan in No Direction Home; Muhammad Ali in We Were Kings), sports (Hoop Dreams, When It Was A Game), or other topics that do not put me to sleep. So, the documentary Tyson by James Toback was right up my wheelhouse. It did not disappoint. Tyson primarily consists of an interview with the former heavyweight champion with highlights (and many lowlights) from his career sprinkled throughout. The greatness of this particular documentary, however, is that it demonstrates just how entirely dysfunctional Mike Tyson was during his glory years and remains, although to somewhat a lesser degree, today. One second, Tyson will sound like a professor (with a strong lisp) outlining his thoughts and motivations as he dissected his opponents and worked his way from the streets of Brooklyn to the heavyweight championship while still just a kid. The next second, he will sound like the raving lunatic that beat his wife, was convicted of raping a pageant contestant and bit off half the ear of Evander Holyfield. He is a sociopath that you come close to feeling some sympathy for as the interview progresses. Makes for a good documentary.

Easy Virtue

Movie Man Mike delivers a different spin on a current release

Easy Virtue. (B+). This was a great light-hearted film. The quick English wit reminded me a bit of an Oscar Wilde play, but this one was based upon a play written by another English playwright, Noel Coward. The casting was spot-on, with Kristen Scott Thomas as Mrs. Whittaker, the mother. Colin Firth plays Mr. Whittaker, the father. Larita Whittaker (Jessica Biel) is an American racecar driver who has just married the Whittakers' son, John (Ben Barnes). Larita is a bit older than John. From the git-go, Mrs. Whittaker makes it clear that she disapproves of Larita and what's more, she doesn't want Larita and John to leave their country estate to move to the big city of London. The two women declare a polite war on one another and the fun begins. The butler, Furber (Kris Marshall), also provides some great comic relief. I recommend this independent film to our readers. It's a refreshing break from the action-packed summer blockbuster movies.

The Hangover

A movie review from The Bleacher Bum

The Hangover: Sometimes a movie knows what it is and doesn't try to be anything more. The Hangover is that type of movie. It doesn't try to send a message; it doesn't try confuse with twists and turns; and it surely doesn't pull on the heart strings. All it does is make you hurt with laughter. It honors the long-standing American tradition of the debaucherous Las Vegas bachelor party. And it pulls no punches. One of the guys is getting married. The groom and the three groomsman travel to Sin City to party. A chicken, Mike Tyson, a baby, a stolen cop car, Rain Man's suit, a mattress, and an unpleasant naked kidnapped Asian gangster are left in their wake. (Make sure you stay through the credits.)

Bleacher Bum Movie Scale: Homerun, Triple, Double, Single, Strikeout

The Hangover: Homerun with runners on base

Up

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Up (B+). The animated short that precedes this new Pixar release is called Partly Cloudy, if memory serves. We all know that storks bring new babies, but did you ever wonder where the storks get the babies from? This enjoyable short proposes one answer to that question. You've probably heard all about the feature presentation--a grumpy old widower ties about a million helium-filled balloons to his house and takes off for adventure in South America. A rotund little cub scout accidentally stows away on his front porch. The two of them reach South America and have adventures. Truth be told, the movie kinds of drags in the middle. But the opening sequence, which tells the story of the widower's childhood and marriage in just a few minutes, is marvelous and heartbreaking, and the end of the movie picks up the steam that the middle is sorely lacking. It's worth seeing, but it could have been better

Phoebe in Wonderland

A review from The Borg Queen

Phoebe in Wonderland: A-

I loved this film. I knew nothing about it when I downloaded it from my Netflix queue to my TV, except that I recognized some of the people in the movie. It centers on a 9-year old girl named Phoebe, played by Elle Fanning (Dakota Fanning's younger sister). The Netflix description just says that a girl gets into trouble into school and gets a part in the play, Alice in Wonderland, upon which the characters begin to speak to her. While that is generally true, the story is so much more. This story is actually about a young girl onsetting with a mental illness. The film captures the torment and confusion the child faces during this transition period, the blame and guilt parents impose on themselves, and the problem of labeling someone with a disease. It also portrays the frustration, anger, and protective feelings siblings deal with when growing up with a mentally ill sibling. Once the movie began, I couldn't stop watching. The caliber of acting in this film was superb. Elle did a phenomenal job and portrayed her character with emotion and honesty far beyond her years. There was one scene in particular with her mother where she begins to cry because she is so scared, confused, sorry, and a wealth of other emotions that you can't help but feel like you want to jump into the TV to console her. The movie also stars Felicity Huffman (Desperate Housewives), Bill Pullman (Independence Day), Patricia Clarkson (Frazier), and Campbell Scott (Music and Lyrics). This is an inspirational and honest movie that presents this topic in an endearing, entertaining way.

Easy Virtue

A new review from the desk of The Movie Snob

Easy Virtue (C-). What could be more up The Movie Snob's alley than a movie set in 1920s England and starring Kristin Scott Thomas (Gosford Park) as a snobbish Brit? Throw in Colin Firth (The Last Legion) as her war-damaged husband and Jessica Biel (The Illusionist) as the brazen American race-car driver who marries into the family, and the movie ought to work. But it just doesn't. None of the characters is very sympathetic--not even Firth's, who is clearly supposed to be. I guess we're also supposed to root for Biel's character, because she bothers to learn the servants' names and because Thomas's matriarch treats her so poorly, but I didn't find her character likeable either. Ben Barnes (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian), who plays Biel's husband, is a total cipher. And, as my movie-going compadre pointed out, Biel's dramatic speech at the end seems modern to the point of anachronism. I wonder whether it is really part of the original Noel Coward play. I doubt I will ever bother to find out. Skip it.

Nick at Nite Potpourri

Nick at Nite brings us up to speed on a medley of movies

Outlander

A few months ago I considered going to the dollar movie to see this film. I should have – I would have saved the extra three bucks it cost me to see the movie in the comfort of my own home. Here is the premise. A spaceship – carrying what looks like a human – crashes to Earth during the reign of the Vikings. Our intrepid spaceman, played by Jim Caviezel, must help his new Norse friends kill an alien-dragon this that he has chased across the solar system to Earth. This movie would have played much faster if the spaceman had not dropped his laser cannon in the water in the first ten minutes of the movie. I give it a “D.

Eagle Eye

Does anyone really care what Shia LaBeouf is doing if he is not wrecking a car, breaking into a pharmacy, or appearing in a Transformers movie? This movie is bad. LaBeouf is set up as a terrorist by some Orwellian computer that is trying to function as an all encompassing “Homeland Security” program for America. Of course, the computer goes all Hal on us and LaBeouf must race to save us all. I was bored and confused. Skip this movie. I give it an “F.”

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Youth is wasted on the young. This is not the greatest movie ever made – it is not even Michael Cera’s best work – but it is a quirky, sometimes funny, often charming tale of young love. Nick and Norah – who are both in or just out of bad relationships – are pushed together by fate – the search for a drunk friend and an underground concert. Their trip through New York City in a beaten up yellow Yugo is an entertaining ride. This movie made me want to be 18 again. I give it an “A.”

Last Chance Harvey

New review from Nick at Nite

Last Chance Harvey

I hold a long flight to New York recently. The diversion on the plane was this film. The film features Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson in a unlikely romance. Hoffman, the boorish American, stars as a somewhat pathetic and distance father who is about to lose his job as a jingle writer. He bumps into and then spends the day with Thompson, a lonely and proper Brit, in London. Hoffman is in London for his daughter’s wedding. After several awkward exchanges, Hoffman leaves his daughter’s wedding early, misses his plane home, is fired from his job, and starts to court Thompson in an airport restaurant. I recommend this movie if you are stuck on an airplane. I give it a “smelly food, screaming child, and captain has fastened his seatbelt.”

The International

Movie Man Mike reviews a fairly recent release

The International (B-) This film had a lot of potential. It might have been better if it were written as a James Bond film. Instead, Louis Salinger, a former Interpol agent played by Clive Owen, is working for the New York District Attorney's office alongside Assistant DA Eleanor Whitman, played by Naomi Watts. The two are investigating some questionable banking transactions by the third largest bank in the world. Each time Salinger gets close to uncovering the bank's big secret--that it is financing world conflict--his witnesses die and the trail nearly disappears. Ultimately, Salinger has to go outside the bounds of the law to bring the bank down. One of my favorite scenes is a shoot-out that takes place at the Guggenheim in New York. I'll never be able to visit that museum again without an exit strategy and without constantly looking over my shoulder for gunmen. I enjoyed this film, but in the end, the resolution of the conflict was a little underwhelming.

Equilibrium

Video review from Movie Man Mike

Equilibrium. (B-) This film was broadcast on the Sci-Fi channel this past weekend. I was a little surprised that I had not seen it or heard of it before, as it stars Christian Bale. But the film was made before Bale debuted in Batman Begins and attained superstar status. It's probably a good thing that the film wasn't widely released because it might have hurt the debut of Batman Begins. Despite these observations, I enjoyed the film. If you like a film with lots of action-fighting and shooting--then this film will entertain you. The storyline is a little weak. The film is set sometime after the Third World War wherein mankind has determined that it can eradicate all further wars with a simple drug that suppresses all emotion. (Taking all emotion out of a film has a tendency to make it a little slow.) Removal of emotions also means removal of art and personal memorabilia that evoke feelings. In any event, there is a resistance force and Christian Bale is part of a special force of trained clerics whose job it is to eradicate the resistance. This film has shades of The Matrix, Gattica, and Blade Runner.

Night at the Museum 2

Movie Review from The Movie Snob

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (D). I disliked the first installment in what is looking frighteningly like a franchise, so why did I see the sequel? Well, it seemed to get marginally better reviews, and, well, okay, because Amy Adams (Sunshine Cleaning) just looked so darned cute in the previews as Amelia Earhart. She cutes it up with great vigor, but even her wide-eyed cutesiness isn't enough to save this bland waste of celluloid. Ben Stiller (Zoolander) returns as Larry Daley, a former museum night watchman who finds himself up to his eyeballs in "adventure" when a magical Egyptian tablet is taken to the Smithsonian Institute and starts bringing all the exhibits to life. One of the exhibits-come-to-life is an evil Egyptian pharoah, played with zero menace but lots of lisp by Hank Azaria (Shattered Glass). He has a plan to take over the world, but if you're like me, you'll find it impossible to care. Skip it.

Atheist Delusions (book review)

Book review from The Movie Snob

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, by David Bentley Hart (Yale 2009). Recently, a handful of prominent atheists have written best-sellers. I haven't read them, but I gather from the many book reviews I have read about them that they are defenses of atheism, attacks on theism (especially the big C, Christianity), or both. Then I read a review of this book and decided to check it out. It wasn't quite what I had expected, because it doesn't really respond to the atheists on philosophical grounds. Rather, Hart spends most of his firepower developing a historical thesis that the "Christian revolution" was one of the most startling and positive influences on the development of civilization in human history. He then develops a secondary thesis, which is that many of the virtues espoused by the New Atheists are vestiges of Christian morality that (1) would never have grown up in pagan soil and (2) are unlikely to retain any vitality or persuasive force in an atheistic or secularist milieu. I enjoyed the book, in part because Hart bends over backwards not to overstate his case. His argument is not that Christians are everywhere and always wonderful people. His argument is simply that the pagan society that preceded Christendom was much worse, and that the cause for wonder is not that so many Christians have failed to live up to Christianity but rather that any system so contrary to man's worse instincts should have erupted onto the world stage and acquired any influence at all.

Up

New review from Movie Man Mike

Up. (A). Thumbs up for "Up"! Pixar nails it with this film. The characters in this film are really rich and charming. Ed Asner is perfect as the voice of Carl Fredrickson and I never suspected that Christopher Plummer was the voice of Charles Muntz until the credits rolled. The dialogue is clever. Many of the lines will have you laughing out loud and you may be compelled to repeat them long after the movie is over. The beginning of this film was a bit of a surprise because it opens with the relationship between main character Carl Fredrickson and Elie Docter. The previews I had seen did not prepare me for this portion of the film, but it's a wonderful part of the larger story of Carl Fredrickson's life adventure. Without giving out any spoilers, let me just say that this is a film the whole family will enjoy and I highly recommend it to anyone.

Summer Hours

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Summer Hours (B). This French movie got a rave review from the Dallas Morning News. When the film opens, a woman is celebrating her 75th birthday with her three children and several grandchildren. She is a widow and has devoted her life to a fine collection of art, and she takes her oldest child, Frederic, aside to share her thoughts of mortality and her feelings about what should happen to the collection when she dies. He resists, but a year later she has died, and the rest of the film is mostly how the three siblings deal with her death and the liquidation of her estate. It is a quiet, thoughtful movie, and I definitely enjoyed it. But I can't say it really stirred me or anything like The Savages did.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Film review from The Movie Snob

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (B-). This is a documentary about a Canadian heavy-metal band called Anvil. If I remember right, it had a brief moment of notoriety when it played at some mammoth concert in Japan with the likes of The Scorpions and Bon Jovi in around 1983. Twenty-five years and twelve albums later, Anvil still toils in obscurity. Its core duo are Steve "Lips" Kudlow, who plays the guitar and is the lead singer, and Robb Reiner, the drummer. Lips in particular still cherishes the dream of making it big, even though he's married and has a little boy and has an unglamorous day job with a catering service. Robb, who's also married, seems a little more realistic and level-headed, but that may just be because he's quieter than the manic Lips. It does play a lot like This Is Spinal Tap, but there is some pathos to it because Lips so desperately wants to make a hit record and go on the big tour. I had a little bit of a hard time warming up to the movie because I really felt sorry for him.

Cinematic Titanic

Stage review from The Movie Snob

Cinematic Titanic. Okay, maybe you're getting tired of reading DVD reviews of the long-defunct TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. Well, bear with me a little longer, because many of the geniuses behind that show are at it again. To summarize, they take really bad movies and make them hilarious by making jokes about the movie during the movie. I gather that Joel Hodgson and several of the other people are now doing their old MST3K shtick on direct-to-DVD releases under the name "Cinematic Titanic." And they even have this live show, which they did at Dallas's Lakewood Theater on Friday and Saturday, June 5-6. I caught tonight's show, in which they riffed on a terrible 1968 monster movie called "Danger on Tiki Island." It was a really funny show. There were five people riffing on the movie, so there was a joke made almost every time there was a pause in the movie -- and there were a lot of pauses. The house was pretty full and very excited, which added to the fun. But apparently there were a few folks there who weren't familiar with the concept in advance. After the show, I heard someone behind me say to her companions, "Well, aren't you glad I brought you out for the stupidest thing ever?" I got a big kick of it myself, and I am inclined to order some of the Cinematic Titanic DVDs online to see if they are as good.

Now Wait for Last Year (Book Review)

Book review from The Movie Snob

Now Remember Wait for Last Year, by Philip K. Dick. This is the third story in the Library of America collection Five Novels of the 1960s and 70s. This is one of Dick's trippier stories. In the mid-21st century, humanity is caught in a war between two alien species--the humanoid aliens from Lilistar and the insectoid reegs. Humanity allied with the Lilistarmen, and unfortunately the Lilistarmen are slowly losing the war. A doctor is caught up in the intrigue of the way when he is tapped to join the entourage of humanity's supreme leader, UN Secretary Molinari. Meanwhile the doctor's estranged wife gets hooked on an insidious new psychedelic drug called JJ-180 that seems to cause the user to time travel, and the sinister Lilistarmen use her addiction to force her to try to infiltrate the Secretary's compound. Once the drug enters the scene, it's hard to tell what's real and what's not anymore. A good story.

Dr. Bloodmoney (Book Review)

Book review from The Movie Snob

Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, by Philip K. Dick. This is the second story in the Library of America collection Five Novels of the 1960s and 70s. I got a kick out of it. At first we meet some characters in the San Francisco Bay area. We come to realize that some time earlier, there was some sort of serious nuclear accident. Then there is an actual nuclear war, and the rest of the story is about, well, how the characters get along after the bomb. The story is somewhat realistic about how survivors band together in towns outside the old cities--kind of like Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank--but of curious there's lots of weird stuff too, as people develop ESP and other weird powers in the wake of the atomic disaster. And there's an astronaut stuck in high Earth orbit, unable to get down after the war, who kind of brings everyone together with his radio transmissions as he passes overhead. A good story.

Earth

Movie review from The Movie Snob

Earth (B+). It pains me to say it, but all nature documentaries are starting to look a little bit alike to me. This is a good one, to be sure, spanning the globe from Arctic to Antarctic, but I couldn't avoid a little feeling that it was all stuff I had seen before. Actually, I had seen part of it before; I have watched the first episode of the TV miniseries Planet Earth, and some of the footage of the great wildlife migration across the Kalihari Desert is used in the movie. I don't know how much more footage from the TV show got recycled for the movie, but it could be quite a bit. Anyway, the movie is certainly well done. There shouldn't be too much in here to upset little kids, as most of the scenes of predators catching their prey are cut just before the blood starts to flow. The camera does linger on a couple of great white sharks leaping out of the water with seals in their mouths, but even then there's no blood to be seen.

MST3K: 20th Anniversary Edition

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Mystery Science Theater 3000: 20th Anniversary Edition. This is an above-average collection from one of my favorite TV shows. As extras, three of the discs contain interviews with the cast and crew about the history of MST3K, and the fourth contains footage from a panel discussion with the cast and crew as a sci-fi convention.

First Spaceship on Venus (C). My internet research indicates that this was a 1960 co-production by East Germany and Poland, dubbed into English and released in America in 1962. Scientific study of a meteorite in the Gobi Desert reveals a recording made by a civilization on Venus. A multi-national team sets out for Venus on a spaceship, survives a meteor storm, and investigates a strangely dead world. George Lucas must have seen this movie before he made Star Wars, as it features an R2-D2-like robot that plays chess with the crewmembers. A few funny riffs, but nothing particularly memorable about this one.

Laserblast (B). This is a bizarre 1978 release. A punk teenager who can never seem to manage to button his shirt finds an alien laser rifle in the desert. He enjoys blowing stuff up with it, but the thing has unfortunate side effects. First he starts to develop a metallic sore on his chest, and second he occasionally mutates into a green humanoid that enjoys blowing stuff up and killing people with the laser gun. Also unfortunate are the real actors who for some reason agreed to be in this movie, such as Keenan Wynn (Kiss Me Kate) and Roddy McDowall (Planet of the Apes). Funny commentary on this one.

Werewolf (A). The highlight of this collection is this 1996 straight-to-video “horror” movie. This movie has too many awesome qualities to mention them all. An appearance by Martin Sheen’s brother Joe Estevez (Soultaker). Numerous actors with bizarre and inexplicable accents. Terrible werewolf special effects. Great riffing by the Satellite of Love crew. This one can’t be missed.

Future War (B). This was a 1997 straight-to-video release about a Jean Claude Van Damme look-alike who escapes to planetEarth with an angry cyborg and his T. rex pets in hot pursuit. An ex-hooker and junkie who’s studying to become a nun hits him with her van and then takes him back to her old halfway house. Nobody would believe his crazy story if these darned dinosaurs didn’t keep popping up and killing people. The special effects are amazingly bad, and continuity is a pipe dream. In the hero’s climactic fight with the cyborg, big red scratches across his chest flash in and out of existence every second or two. Definitely an above-average episode.

Dead Calm

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Dead Calm (C-). With the lovely Nicole Kidman's 42d birthday less than a month away, there's no better time than the present to cozy up with one of her films. I had not seen this one before, and I was not particularly impressed. A married couple played by Kidman (Batman Forever) and Sam Neill (The Dish) are sailing across the Pacific in their fine yacht when they come across a derelict schooner. A delirious young man played by Billy Zane (BloodRayne) rows over to their boat from the derelict raving about everybody else on board being dead from food poisoning. Neill's character astutely rows back over to check out the death ship while the crazy guy is asleep. Turns out Zane's character is a homicidal maniac, and he wakes up in time to take off with Neill's yacht, his wife, and his little dog too. Neill goes into pursuit as best he can on his sinking tub. After that, it's a pretty typical cat-and-mouse thriller with some typical stupidity on the parts of the good guys. Even Nic's loveliness can't keep this movie from capsizing.

Terminator Salvation

New movie review from The Movie Snob

Terminator Salvation (C-). I was no huge Terminator fan to begin with, but I thought they were at least above-average action fare--even T3: Rise of the Machines. This one, however, didn't work for me. There's an opening flashback in which a condemned murderer named Marcus Wright agrees to donate his body to science after his execution. Then we flash forward to 2018, when the world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland and the war rages on between Skynet (the machines) and the Resistance (the humans). John Connor (Christian Bale, Laurel Canyon) is a charismatic leader within the Resistance, although he is not part of the high command. Wright suddenly turns up, looking none the worse for having been executed a couple of decades earlier, so he sets out to try to discover who has brought him back to life and why. Lots of stuff gets blown up as killer robots pop up every so often. The attractive Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village), very pregnant, plays Connor's wife and is given nothing in particular to do. Helena Bonham Carter (Fight Club) surprisingly pops up in a small role.

For me this movie had some problems rather like Christian Bale's early bomb Reign of Fire, in which dragons(!) are roused from hibernation and lay waste the Earth. One big problem is how much of a military the humans still have intact, despite the robots' awesome power and firepower. How do the humans manage to manufacture all their jets, helicopters, arms, and other technological wonders? And pump and refine all the oil necessary to make them go? For that matter, what do these people eat? There's not a crop or herd animal in sight, and if there were the machines would presumably terminate them. Finally, how do these people (John Connor in particular) survive getting pummeled and tossed by the Terminators? Seems like one punch from these metallic behemoths ought to crush your organs to jelly. I can suspend disbelief as to a military computer system becoming self-aware and attacking humanity. But when a virtually unstoppable robot throws a human being across a room and into a metal girder, I can't believe that person is getting right back up to continue the fight.

The Mummy (1932)

DVD review from The Movie Snob

The Mummy (1932) (B). I expected this old-time horror movie to be a cheesy movie centering on a slow-moving bandaged monster strangling victims in ancient tombs. It was a lot more sophisticated than that, with a plot that is fairly similar to the 1999 Brendan Fraser remake. Mummy Imhotep (Boris Karloff, Frankenstein) is reanimated when a foolish young archaeologist opens a cursed box and reads from the Scroll of Thoth. Ten years later, Imhotep resurfaces, but he passes for a living human being, albeit of cadaverous and creepy mien. He directs a British archaeology team to dig in a certain spot, where they swiftly discover an undespoiled tomb of an ancient Egyptian princess. Imhotep's purpose, it turns out, is to use the Scroll of Thoth to revive his long-lost love, and he will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal. Given the love story, this Mummy is a rather more sympathetic monster than most.

Monsters vs. Aliens

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Monsters vs. Aliens (C). I didn't expect much out of this animated feature, and it delivered about what I expected. Reese Witherspoon (The Importance of Being Earnest) voices protagonist Susan, a woman who gets hit by a meteorite minutes before her wedding to a jerky TV newscaster. The radiation turns her into a 50-foot giant (and turns her hair completely white), which prevents the wedding from taking place and incidentally causes the U.S. government to capture her and sequester her with some other monsters like Dr. Cockroach, the Missing Link, and a blob named B.O.B. But when an alien attacks the Earth to recover the mysterious element that turned Susan into Ginormica (her government-assigned monster name), the government releases the monsters to save the day. Susan is an appealing character, and it's cute to imagine Reese Witherspoon behind her voice, but the plot is slight and the humor is not all that hilarious. I imagine kids would like it. The only other people in the theater with me were a woman and her little boy, and I heard them laugh once or twice.

Six Days Seven Nights

Netflix review from The Movie Snob

Six Days Seven Nights (B-). This is an utterly disposable little movie, but it was just fine for a weeknight timekiller. And somehow my pal The Borg Queen channeled it into her glorious huge TV directly from the internet, so we didn't have to wait for Netflix to send the DVD to her! Astonishing. I noticed a couple of teensy pauses in the movie here and there, but this film is impervious to tiny imperfections, given certain glaring holes in the plot. The eccentric Anne Heche (I Know What You Did Last Summer) stars as a tightly wound New Yorker who jets off on a South Pacific vacation with her new fiance (David Schwimmer, Madagascar). A painfully contrived work-related emergency requires her to island-hop somewhere else, and she has no choice but to take a rusty old plane piloted by a Jimmy-Buffett-esque old pilot (Harrison Ford, Regarding Henry). When she insults his plane, I seriously expected him to reply that it was the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy. Of course they crash on a deserted island, and they bond despite their quarter-century age difference. Stupid and predictable? Yes, but sometimes that's all you want in a movie.

Star Trek

Movie Man Mike adds his two cents' worth about . . .

Star Trek: Origins (A). This film is spot on. Two things make this film great. Casting and the script. The actors do a wonderful job of channeling the original cast of this franchise. Zachary Quinto is downright frightening as a young Spock. The script is also well done. At first, I was a little annoyed that the script alters the timeline of events from the original storyline, but after sleeping on it, I decided that it kind of makes sense from a theoretical science standpoint, so I am okay with it. And in any event, the changes surely won't alter the entertainment value of the next episodes that are sure to come from the reinvention of this franchise. I particularly enjoyed learning that they used the voice Majel Barrett for the computer voice on the Enterprise. And, it was fitting that they dedicated the film to Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett Roddenberry. I won't give any plot spoilers, but I recommend this one.

Garden of Evil

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Garden of Evil (C+). This was the last of a trio of Westerns I bought as a package, along with Rawhide and The Gunfighter. It is only a middling movie, but I must say it looked great on The Borg Queen's giant HD TV. It was filmed in Cinemascope, which I gather was some sort of ultra-widescreen format. Anyway, three Americans are stranded in sleepy Mexican village when the ship they are traveling on blows its engine. There's the mysterious and laconic Westerner (Gary Cooper, High Noon), the voluble gambler Fiske (Richard Widmark, How the West Was Won), and the hot-headed young bounty hunter Daly (Cameron Mitchell, Death of a Salesman). Then the lovely Leah Fuller (Susan Hayward, Rawhide) bursts onto the scene, promising scads of money to anyone who will travel with her into the Mexican wilderness to help her rescue her injured husband (Hugh Marlowe, Rawhide) from a collapsed gold mine. The three Americans, plus one Mexican fellow, sign on for the journey deep into the territory of the deadly Apache Indians. Drama and adventure, more or less, ensue. It's not particularly believable, but the scenery is nice, and it's hard not to like Cooper and Hayward.

Management

Movie review from The Movie Snob

Management (B+). I went into this independent flick with low expectations. The Dallas Morning News reviewer gave it only a C, and I saw a trailer that made it look absolutely terrible. But it stars the irrepressible Steve Zahn (That Thing You Do!), not to mention Jennifer Aniston (Office Space), so I resolved to give it a chance (at a matinee). I was pleasantly surprised. Zahn is well-cast as Mike, a man-child who works (and lives) at a motel owned by his parents in a small town in Arizona. Aniston is Sue, an employee of a company back East that deals in corporate art, i.e., paintings you see in hotel rooms. Mike is understandably smitten when Sue checks into the motel, and he sets out to romance Sue in his own inept fashion--he's rather like an older and much less worldly Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything. His stalkerish behavior would make him totally unsympathetic--except that Sue, who is sad and dissatisfied with her own life, is not totally unreceptive to Mike's overtures during her brief stay. That's all the excuse Mike needs to spend his life savings on a one-way ticket to Baltimore, where he shows up at her office unannounced. Things unspool from there. Woody Harrelson (White Men Can't Jump), who is not one of my favorite actors, is perfect as Sue's former boyfriend Jango, a former punk-rocker turned yogurt mogul. Maybe it was just my low expectations, but I really enjoyed this movie.

Rawhide

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Rawhide (C-). This 1951 Western starring Tyrone Power and the lovely Susan Hayward just wasn't very good. The setting: a stagecoach station somewhere in the remote wilderness, manned by a grizzled old hand and tenderfoot Tom Owens (Power). A stagecoach stops for lunch; its passengers include Vinnie Holt (Hayward) and her infant niece, whom she is taking back East. But word arrives that four outlaws are on the loose in the vicinity, and company policy forbids the transport of children under such circumstances, so Holt and her niece are stranded at the station. After the stagecoach leaves, the outlaws show up, led by George Zimmerman (Hugh Marlowe, The Day the Earth Stood Still), with a plan to rob the next gold-laden stagecoach passing through from California. The grizzled old hand is quickly dispatched, and for the rest of the movie we wonder whether Tom and Vinnie will survive the inevitable showdown with the outlaws. Personally, I couldn't be bothered to wonder very hard about it.

Star Trek

Movie review from The Movie Snob

Star Trek (B+). How curious that in all my years of blogging I have never reviewed a Trek movie. But, as it happens, we started The Movie Court in February 2003, and the last Trek movie, Nemesis, was a 2002 release. As everyone knows, the guy behind TV's Lost, J.J. Abrams, is directing this reboot of the franchise with an origin story about James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and the rest of the original crew. The result is a solid action/science-fiction movie. I would (and did) complain that one or two of the hand-to-hand combat scenes were very badly and choppily edited so that you couldn't even tell what was going on. (I seem to notice this problem in a lot of movies these days--is it getting more common, or am I just more aware?) But if you like sci-fi and action movies, you should enjoy this film even if you don't like Star Trek at all. And if you do like Star Trek, as I do, I think you'll like it a lot because it has plenty of little nods to the original series. (For example, the assured presence of Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood, National Treasure: Book of Secrets).) And the young actors and actresses who take the helm are generally well cast and do a fine job. (Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead), however, seems like a poor choice for Scotty.) But Trekkers may not love it, for reasons divulged after the spoiler alert.

*** SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT ***

Actually, I don't think I'm committing too much of a spoiler, but better safe than sorry. As you may already know, the movie involves time travel. Specifically, the villain is from the future, and he's eager to deal out worlds of hurtin' to the young Federation of Planets, home to our young Kirk, Spock, et al. My beef, which I suspect many hardcore Trek fans will share, is that this villain performs deeds that effectively rewrite longstanding Trek history. Without being unnecessarily specific, I can say that certain characters are killed and certain planets are destroyed such that certain familiar events from the original Star Trek series can never happen the way we remember them. And these events are of such a magnitude that it seems safe to say that the history of the whole Federation will have to be different. A reviewer in The Weekly Standard complained that this is a lazy use of time travel that is unworthy of serious science fiction, and that the 1960s series handled a similar scenario much better and more memorably in the famous episode "The City on the Edge of Forever." I would agree, and add that it seems lazy to me as well because it relieved the filmmakers of the obligation to be faithful to the various TV incarnations of Trek, since they can chalk any inconsistencies up to the changes in history caused by their own movie. So although I enjoyed the movie--and I give high marks to most of the young actors and actresses who step into these familiar roles and make them their own--it did not leave me entirely satisfied. I think The Borg Queen will agree with me.

17 Again

Film review from The Movie Snob

17 Again (B). The Borg Queen and I caught a matinee of this flick starring heartthrob-of-the-moment Zac Efron (Hairspray). I think Big is a much overrated movie, so I was not expecting much from this Big-in-reverse tale. Perhaps as a result, I rather enjoyed it. First we get the backstory: in 1989, Efron's character Mike O'Donnell passes up a chance to play college basketball to marry his (pregnant) high school sweetheart. Fast forward 19 years or so, and Mike (briefly played by Matthew Perry, The Whole Nine Yards) is an unhappy man, estranged from his two children and on the verge of divorce from the same high school sweetheart (now played by Leslia Mann, Knocked Up). An encounter with a mysterious old man soon turns Mike back into his high-school self. With assistance from his best friend (dork turned dorky software millionaire), Mike enrolls in high school and tries to figure out the purpose of his quest. It's no Citizen Kane, but I found it a pleasant diversion. I do feel bad for Melora Hardin (TV's The Office), stuck in yet another thankless big-screen role--this time as the school principal who is wooed by the hapless computer mogul).

The Gunfighter

DVD review from The Movie Snob

The Gunfighter (B). According to Entertainment Weekly, this is a classic Western (1950) only recently released on DVD, so I thought I'd give it a try. It's a pretty good little movie. Gregory Peck (To Kill a Mockingbird) stars as Jimmy Ringo, a famous outlaw and gunslinger who, at 35, has grown tired of his life of notoriety. He seeks out his long-estranged wife in the frontier town of Cayenne, but he finds he cannot easily leave the past behind. Hot-headed young guns want to test their mettle against him, and others seek revenge against him for past crimes, real or imagined. Having grown up knowing Gregory Peck only from his portrayal of Atticus Finch, I doubted his ability to play a fast-draw cowboy, but he turns in a surprisingly believable performance. And at 85 minutes, the film doesn't dawdle much. I also liked the short featurette "The Western Grows Up."

Sunshine Cleaning

A movie review by The Movie Snob

Sunshine Cleaning (C+). I think this movie is from the same producers who brought you Little Miss Sunshine -- it even stars Alan Arkin, like Little Miss Sunshine did. But despite the efforts at sunniness by the two female leads, this is a pretty grim story. Amy Adams (Junebug) stars as Rose, a single mother who is burdened by a low-paying job working for a maid service, a pathetic affair with a married man (Steve Zahn, That Thing You Do!), and a little boy who's getting into trouble at school. Her lover suggests she could make more money running a crime-scene clean-up service, and she drafts her ne'er-do-well sister to help her (Emily Blunt, The Devil Wears Prada). And we learn more stuff about their background that's also very dark. It's not a bad movie, but it somehow comes off a little contrived or forced or something.

Adventureland

Movie review from The Movie Snob

Adventureland (B). This is a coming-of-age story set in the halcyon year of 1987. A smart, sensitive guy named James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg, The Village) has just graduated from college and is looking forward to spending the summer in Europe before going to journalism school at Columbia. Unfortunately it turns out that his family has just suffered a financial setback, which means he's got to stay in Pittsburgh and get a summer job. His only option, it soon develops, is to work the (crooked) games at a dumpy amusement park called Adventureland. His co-workers turn out to be an interesting crew that quickly distract him from the woeful turn his summer has taken -- the guitar-toting mechanic who may or may not have played a gig with Lou Reed, the melancholy philosopher who smokes a pipe and loves Gogol, the voluptuous Lisa P., and of course the girl he falls for, the sad and wounded Emily (Kristen Stewart, Twilight). It's a pretty good movie. And I couldn't help but notice a certain similarity to my own life -- after I graduated from college in 1990, I spent the summer living at home and sacking groceries at a Kroger before heading off to law school. It wasn't quite as zany as an amusement park, but I did get to dress up as a gorilla for about a week during "Zoo Days." And I met a cute checker that I dated for a while afterwards. So this movie really kind of spoke to me.

Spinal Tap concert review

Review by The Movie Snob

The three stars of This Is Spinal Tap (Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer) are touring with a show called "Unwigged and Unplugged," and I saw their performance in Dallas this evening. I thoroughly enjoyed it. They played for almost two hours, and they covered many of the most memorable songs from Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind, interspersed with some comedic repartee and some reminiscences about the movies. They even took some questions from the audience. (They were all softball questions from gushing fans, as I recall. If I had gotten the mic and screwed up the courage, I would've asked Guest what happened to make his last movie, For Your Consideration, such a misfire.) The guys play and sing well enough for me, and of course the material is hilarious. Of course, the songs from Spinal Tap sounded a lot different in these acoustic renditions, but the crowd still ate up "Stonehenge," "Give Me Some Money," "The Majesty of Rock," "Listen to the Flower People," "Big Bottoms," etc. The songs from A Mighty Wind sounded pretty much the same as in the movie, with McKean's wife Annette O'Toole joining the band for "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" and "The Good Book Song." They did some other songs I'd never heard before, which were all enjoyable enough except for one unfortunately scatological one about Elvis Presley. And they did a very funny, very sped-up version of "Start Me Up" by The Rolling Stones. I give this show an A.

Fleetwood Mac concert review

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Three friends and I saw the Fleetwood Mac show at the American Airlines Center last night. I think we all generally thought it was a good show. Christine McVie is not participating in this tour, but Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks all are in. They played a solid set of around 2 hours. Of course they focused on songs that did not originally feature Christine McVie on lead vocals, and they did lots of album tracks from Rumours. Lindsey Buckingham dazzled on the guitar, especially on a version of "Big Love" that he played by himself on acoustic guitar. Stevie Nicks looks like she hasn't aged a day since the 80s, and she sounds pretty much the same too--maybe her voice is just a touch lower and huskier. Mick Fleetwood looks pretty demented, and I never understood a word he said when he addressed the audience. Somewhat to my surprise, they played only one of Stevie Nicks's solo songs that I noticed, "Stand Back." Anyway, the band sounded pretty good, and they did "Tusk," "Say You Love Me," "Go Your Own Way," and most of the hits that Nicks did lead vocals for like "Gypsy" and "Dreams."

The downsides: The volume was pretty comfortable for maybe the first two-thirds of the show, but then they suddenly seemed to jack it up to a painful level, where it stayed for the rest of the show. A couple of super-extended guitar and drum solos got a little torturous after a while.

And I have to complain about the AAC. We were on the first row of the uppermost balcony, section 321. Who designed these seats? They simply are not large enough to accommodate normal-sized adults. The four of us could not simultaneously sit back in our chairs, or our shoulders would have been totally jammed together. My buddy Mark, who's over 6 feet tall, must have really been suffering. For $60, I would think we could get full-sized chairs!

But on the whole, it was a worthwhile show. I give it a solid B.

Quantum of Solace

DVD review from The Bleacher Bum

Quantum of Solace

Like most guys, it doesn't take much for me to enjoy a James Bond movie. A cool car, some alluring ladies, a few explosions, a brutal fight, an exciting chase sequence and dame Judi Dench are about all I need. If the movie has a good plot and some witty dialogue, then it instantly becomes a James Bond classic. Quantum of Solace has all the aforementioned ingredients. James Bond (Daniel Craig) uncovers a global conspiracy by a well-funded organization named Quantum. Quantum is trying to control the majority of Earth's most treasured resource . . . water, not oil. Quantum also frequently converts CIA and MI-6 operatives into traitorous murderers.

As in Casino Royale, Craig is really good as Bond. He is very skilled and athletic at the physical stunts while being deft and cunning at Bond's mental side. Bond also has a personal vendetta that he is trying to fulfill while saving the world. The movie traverses the globe, showcases lovely ladies and keeps the action movie at a breakneck pace. Quantum of Solace exceeded my expectations. I enjoyed the ride on land, in the air, on the sea and in the bedroom.

Bleacher Bum Movie Scale: homerun, triple, double, single, strikeout

Quantum of Solace: Stand-up Double without a throw

Martian Time-Slip (book review)

Book review from the desk of The Movie Snob

Martian Time-Slip, by Philip K. Dick. This is just the first of five novels included in the new collection of Dick's work by the Library of America, entitled Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s (2008). As with the previous volume, I'll review each novel as I finish it, or else I'll forget the first ones before I finish the volume. Martian Time-Slip (1964) is a good and, by Dick's standards, fairly straightforward yarn. It is the near future, and Earth has gotten hugely overcrowded. Nervous breakdowns from the stress of life are commonplace. Some colonies have been established on Mars (where all the action takes place), and one of the main characters is a gifted mechanic/electrician who emigrated after suffering a breakdown on Earth. He is drawn into the orbit of the leader of the powerful Martian trade unions, who is de facto one of the most powerful men on the planet. Somehow (I forget how, exactly), the union guy comes to believe that a particular autistic child has psychic powers akin to time-travel, and he persuades the electrician to help him try to communicate with the boy (for purely venal motives, of course). Things unfold unexpectedly and satisfactorily. A good story, and not as suffocatingly paranoid as many of Dick's stories.

Heroes (book review)

Book review by The Movie Snob

Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle, by Paul Johnson (Harper 2007). I picked this book up from Half-Price Books for $8, figuring correctly that it would be a pleasant and breezy read. Paul Johnson is a British journalist-turned-historian who has written some really long books on historical subjects. His Modern Times, which is a world history of the 20th century, is a really enjoyable book. But this is one of his shorter works (280 pages), and it is just a series of vignettes about people that he (and, in most cases, many others as well) regard as heroes. Many are military figures and rulers, as the subtitle suggests, but a few of the people he includes are odd choices (Emily Dickinson?) and a couple were people I had never heard of. But his writing is always engaging, and it's nice to hear a Brit wax on about the heroic stature of George Washington.

21 Up

DVD review from The Movie Snob

21 Up (B+). I've blogged before about this series of documentaries about a group of British kids -- well, they were 7-year-old kids in 1963, when they were first interviewed on film. Then the filmmakers went back and re-interviewed every seven years after that, so this third installment was made or released in 1977. The previous entries were like 45 minutes each, but this one is a full-length feature. It is very interesting to see these 21-year-old kids, some in college, some married and working, and at least one or two struggling to find a place in the world. I liked a couple of the kids better in this installments than previously. Especially the little boy who thought at age seven that he would go off to Africa and be a missionary. He seemed kind of weird in the first two installments, but now as a math major in college he seems much more grounded and sensible. The rich girl who came off rather badly in 7+7 struck me as a little more sympathetic this time around. It's remarkable how many of the kids had divorced parents by this time. I do have one complaint, that the combination of bad acoustics and thick accents made some parts totally unintelligible to me. Still, I'm really looking forward to the next installment, especially to see how the three boys from the bottom of the class structure fared under Thatcherism.

The International

Movie review from The Movie Snob

The International (B-). I had kinda sorta wanted to see this movie just because it starred current cool dude Clive Owen (Children of Men) and cute little buck-toothed Naomi Watts (The Painted Veil). Well, it's really Clive's movie; Naomi is barely in it, and she has virtually nothing to do. But Clive does a good job as an Interpol agent who's trying to bust a shady Luxembourg bank that's dealing high-tech weapon systems to Third World countries. This is a bank that has an assassin on permanent retainer, so you definitely don't want to incur a lot of overdraft fees with them. The movie's message is clear--giant international banks control everything, and they keep assassins on retainer, so don't mess. Kind of a downer, don't you think? Still, Clive is a pro, and there's a massive shootout in the Guggenheim Museum that's kind of fun to watch.

As I Lay Dying (book review)

From The Movie Snob

As I Lay Dying, by Richard John Neuhaus (2002). Not to get all morbid on you, but dying has been on my mind some of late. There are probably several reasons for that fact. I'm 41, so I'm getting pretty close to middle age. Three of my grandparents died when I was just a child, but my maternal grandmother just passed away a couple of years ago. And then some people I really admire have died even more recently, like William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus himself. Fr. Neuhaus was a Lutheran minister turned Catholic priest, and he edited a wonderful magazine that I have taken for years called First Things. He himself contributed lots of articles to the magazine, plus a mnothly column called "The Public Square," and he always impressed me with both his erudition and his common sense.

Fr. Neuhaus barely survived a large tumor in his colon in the early 1990s, and he alluded to his brush with death in some of his articles. The cancer was discovered to have returned, I believe in late 2008, and he died in early 2009. But several years ago he wrote this little book, which is about half devoted to meditations on death in general and half devoted to Fr. Neuhaus's own near-death experience. It is a thoughtful and interesting book, to be sure, but I suppose I was hoping for some sort of revelation about death and dying that really isn't possible on this side of the grave. I think it was well worth reading.

MST3K: Volume XIV

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Mystery Science Theater: Volume XIV

This installment is definitely a mixed bag…

Mad Monster, plus short Commander Cody and the Radar Men from the Moon (D). I think this must be been from very early in the show’s run. They had a different guy supplying the voice of robot Tom Servo, and he just wasn’t funny. Of course the movie is awful, an old black-and-white movie about a mad scientist who creates a serum that turns his slow-witted and unsuspecting gardener into a wolfman. But the heckling just isn’t all that funny in this episode. Maybe they just hadn’t hit their stride yet.

Manhunt in Space, plus short General Hospital (B+). Yes, the short is a clip from a very old episode of General Hospital. And the “movie” is actually cobbled together from episodes of a short-lived 1950s TV show called Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. This is a funny episode, with amusing commentary and an entertainingly bad “movie” to boot. Rocky is a square-jawed all-American-type space ranger, and he has a dorky, scrawny sidekick named Winky. A gal named Vena is apparently part of the crew too, but the guys boss her around like a waitress and she doesn’t bat an eye. Very funny.

Soultaker (B-). I had seen this one before, and I thought I remembered it being funnier than this. From 1990, this movie was written by the female lead, who bears an unfortunate and oft-remarked resemblance to Tonya Harding. Anyhow, four young people are in a bad car accident in which their souls are thrown clear out of their bodies. A dark angel or grim reaper or something, played by Joe Estevez (younger brother of Martin Sheen), starts chasing them all over creation in order to slurp their souls into these palm-sized rings he carries around. Not bad, but not one of the best. I was surprised to find that the writer-star of Soultaker, Vivian Schilling, has a website and has apparently had a couple of novels published. Good for her! Special bonus interview with Joe Estevez himself, who proclaims that he doesn’t have a problem with MST3K making fun of him and the movie, while still insisting the movie is pretty good.

Final Justice (B). The inimitable Joe Don Baker (Walking Tall) stars as a Texas deputy sheriff named Thomas Jefferson Geronimo who catches a murderous Mafioso named Palermo who’s trying to make a run for the border. For some inexplicable reason, the State Department gives Geronimo the job of escorting Palermo back to Sicily . But the plane is unexpectedly grounded on the island of Malta , and the rest of the movie unspools there as Palermo escapes and Geronimo tries to catch him. Pretty funny, although the hecklers rely a little too much on Baker’s rotundity for punch lines. Special bonus interview with the director, Greydon Clark. Why do these guys agree to these interviews? They cannot help but try to defend their movies, despite the evidence before our own eyes. Not surprisingly, he reveals that the government of Malta was trying to encourage filmmakers to shoot there, which is why a movie that’s all about a Sicilian mobster takes place entirely outside of Italy .

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Movie review from Movie Man Mike


The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) C+. I generally don’t like it when older movies I’ve seen are remade. There is always the desire of the new filmmakers to do something different with the move—like maybe change the story. And when it comes to a classic movie like the 1951 version of this movie, I would just as soon keep the original. Don’t mess with a good thing.

The story is much the same from the original (at least insofar as I can recall), but there seemed to be less of an emphasis on the capacity of the human race for violence and perhaps a bit more emphasis on the general condition of the human race and of the planet as a whole (famine, global warming, etc.). The message of the aliens was to save the planet from its people. It’s a bit preachy. Also, I wasn’t really all that convinced that the characters were able to change the minds of the aliens insofar as extinguishing the human race. I just didn’t see it. From a visual perspective, I enjoyed the special effects in this updated film. I also thought Jennifer Connelly was a good casting choice. John Cleese gave a nice performance in a more serious role for him. I didn’t really care for Jaden Smith’s character. I thought Kathy Bates did a nice job, but she seemed a little too Hillary-esque as the Secretary of Defense. And I didn’t really care for the fact that she was speaking not only for the President of the United States, but she had the gumption to speak for the world. Not that the latter might not happen under certain unnamed administrations, it just seemed a little too contrived that the Secretary of Defense would (or could) deny a superior race access to the leaders of other foreign countries.

The Martian Child

DVD review from The Borg Queen

The Martian Child -- B

I never heard of this movie before Netflix recommended it to me. It had a cast with names of people I recognized so I thought I'd give it a try. I went in with no expectations at all. All in all, I was pleased. The story centers on the relationship between David Gordon (John Cusack, Grosse Pointe Blank) and a young boy, Dennis (Bobby Coleman, The Family Man). David is a science-fiction writer and recent widower. Prior to his wife's death, they began the adoption process. After his wife dies, he learns that he has been matched with Dennis, a 6-year old available for adoption. David at first grapples with whether or not he can be a single father, especially considering his grieving. When David first meets Dennis, Dennis is isolating himself from the other kids by concealing himself in a large cardboard box, claiming that the sunlight hurts him. David learns that Dennis is convinced that he is from Mars and does things like wear a belt made of batteries to keep himself from floating away (due to the lighter gravity on Earth, of course). David begins to feel a connection with Dennis and decides to go forward with the process. The remainder of the movie, which takes place during the "trial period" for the adoption, is about the struggle of David to learn to interact with Dennis, who has various behavior problems, and for Dennis to learn how to bond with David. Along the way, Dennis demonstrates some peculiar abilities that also raise the question of whether Dennis truly is from another planet. I did not know how the story would end, and found it enjoyable. And, I even shed a couple of tears at the end. So, I'll give Netflix a nod for picking a movie I never heard of, but actually enjoyed. The movie also stars Joan Cusack (Nine Months), Amanda Peet (The Whole Nine Yards), Oliver Platt (Pieces of April), and Richard Schiff (I Am Sam).

I Love You, Man

Movie review from The Movie Snob

I Love You, Man (B). I'll assume you already know the set-up for this movie: the always-entertaining Paul Rudd (Clueless) plays a guy who gets engaged, only to discover that he has no close male friends to be his groomsmen, much less a best man. He gets increasingly concerned about this state of affairs, which eventually leads him to befriend a slacker dude played by Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), which friendship ironically threatens the very engagement that inspired it. In short, it's a romantic comedy about male friendship instead of an ordinary romance. It had very few clunker moments, and I enjoyed it throughout. But I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had seen it in a crowded and spirited theater instead of at a Saturday morning matinee with about 3 other people in the theater. Oh, and it should go without saying that the "R" rating is amply justified by the rampant vulgar language. I wonder if these movies would do as well--or even better--at the box office if they cleaned up their act a little bit...

Twilight

Nick at Nite favors us with a DVD review

Twilight

Ordinarily, I am drawn towards all things Vampire, Zombie, etc ... As such, one would expect that I would devour Meyer’s Twilight series. That said, I have not read the books, and I did not camp out to see the movies. Frankly, I am just not that interested in reading a book or seeing a movie based on any teenage love story - even if it involves Vampires (isn’t this every episode of an afterschool special with a little horror mixed in?). So, I will admit that I was shocked when my wife rented this movie and it turned out to be good. My wife loved it. Of course, she had read the book. As a non-believer (in the movie, not Vampires), I was ultimately swayed by a new twist on an old tale. These Vampires – all impossibly young – are vegetarians. They only eat animal flesh. Mostly, I appreciate the complicated back story that my wife was explaining to me during the movie. I give Meyer credit for her creativity, and I say check it out. Also, I was surprised to learn that sunlight does not kill Vampires and that they don’t sleep in coffins.

The Regensburg Lecture (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob

The Regensburg Lecture, by James V. Schall, S.J (St. Augustine's Press 2007). On September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany. The title of the lecture was "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections." A few days later, there was an intense negative reaction to this lecture in the Muslim world. I was curious about what exactly the Pope had said, but never curious enough to find and read the text.

This little book contains the text of the lecture (about 16 small pages), prefaced by about 130 pages of reflections on that lecture by Father Schall, who is a professor of government at Georgetown University. It also contains an Augsut 2006 essay by Father Schall entitled "On the Term 'Islamo-Fascism,'" which is also available online at www.ignatiusinsight.com.

The book and lecture are dense but interesting. The passage of the lecture that seems to have provoked the most outrage was the Pope's quotation from a dialogue written by a Byzantine emperor in the late 1300s. As the emperor was facing imminent siege by Muslim forces, it is not surprising that he was not particularly complimentary of Islam, but the remarks that the Pope focused on were the assertions (1) that attempting to spread religious faith through violence is unreasonable, and (2) that acting unreasonably is contrary to God's nature. The Pope discusses the strain in Islamic thought that God is so utterly transcendent that His will bears no relation to our categories of rationality. He concedes that similar strains of thought have been known in Christian philosophy as well, but he insists that reason and the reasonableness of God are fundamental to Christianity, rightly understood, from its very beginning. And he argues that the university should and must struggle to maintain its openness to all aspects of reason. He acknowledges and argues against the tendency in modern thought to leap from a sensible premise--that science can measure only physical reality--to an unproved conclusion--that only physical reality exists. As I say, it is a dense lecture, and Father Schall only partially demystified it for me. But I enjoyed it, and I appreciated getting to see firsthand what had caused those riots and such.

Alien Trespass

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Alien Trespass (C). The conceit of this movie is that it is supposedly a long-lost print of a 1957 alien-and-monster movie that was supposedly tied up in legal battles and was never supposed to be released. (So we learn in a fake newsreel that rolls at the very beginning of the movie.) Eric McCormack (TV's Will & Grace) plays the main character, an astronomer whose body is a temporarily possessed by an alien marshal on the trail of a deadly one-eyed green space monster called a Ghota. Many of the genre's conventions are in place: teenagers who see the monster and escape, police officers who don't believe their story, cheesy special effects, a plucky blond waitress who stands up to the monster, the astronomer's luscious and doting brunette wife (wait, was that part of the convention?), etc. Anyhoo the movie's problem is not a lack of fidelity to the source material--it's an excess of fidelity. Those movies generally weren't very good (with exceptions like The Day the Earth Stood Still), and this one really isn't either. Featuring Robert Patrick (Walk the Line) and Dan Lauria (TV's The Wonder Years) as two of the main cops.

Bolt

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Bolt (A-). As metacritic.com says, this movie got "generally favorable reviews," and imdb.com says it grossed $114 million in the USA, but I have the idea that it is viewed as a bit of a flop. Personally, I enjoyed it a lot. Yes, it borrowed from Toy Story and The Truman Show for the plot: a cute white dog stars in a science-fiction/action TV series in which he has super powers, and he has actually been raised to think that everything that happens in the show is real. It happens that he is accidentally separated from his co-star and owner, a little girl named Penny, and so he must embark on a double journey: from NYC to Hollywood, and from his fantasy world to reality. Along the way he teams up with a streetwise alleycat named Mittens, and she kind of steals the show in my book. I thought it was charming and heartwarming. Thus, the high grade.

MST3K Volume 12

DVD Review from The Movie Snob

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection Volume 12. I don’t think I’ve written about MST3K before, but I’m a long-time fan of this show that ran for maybe 7 years on Comedy Central and 3 more on the Sci-Fi channel. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, the basic idea is that they show bad movies, and at the bottom of the screen you can see three silhouettes, as though people were sitting in front of you in a movie theater. The silhouetted people make wisecracks about the movie from the opening credits through the closing credits, and the wisecracks are what make the show funny. There are also segments in which the wisecracking guys put on little skits of their own, but those parts are not usually all that amusing. Oh, and two of the guys are robots. Since cancellation, they’ve put out a few episodes on single-episode DVDs and many more in four-episode volumes, and I have most of them. I just haven’t been reviewing them on the Court. So here are my reviews of the four episodes that make up this collection. I skipped most of the skits, so the reviews relate just to the movie parts.

The Rebel Set, plus short feature Johnny at the Fair. Sometimes the guys show a “short” before the main feature, and they are often funnier then the movie. That is probably true in this case. Johnny at the Fair is about an annoying little boy who wanders away from his parents at a Canadian world fair, and the commentary is very entertaining. The Rebel Set is a lame 1959 crime movie about three losers who get recruited by the owner of a beatnik coffee house to commit an armored-car robbery. I never watched the TV show Get Smart, but the criminal mastermind guy apparently played the Chief on that show. The movie is goofy, and the commentary is funny. To my surprise, they got one of the stars to give an interview for the disc. This disc is a solid B.

Secret Agent Super Dragon. This is a 1966 James Bond rip-off with a super-smug secret agent whose code name is, yes, “Super Dragon.” The plot is incomprehensible, and SASD’s fight scenes and escapes from certain death are ridiculous. So is the shlubby guy who plays SASD’s Walmart version of Q. The guys have some fun with this one, but it’s not one of the best entries in the series. B-.

The Starfighters. According to the Internet Movie Database, this is the second worst movie of all time, and I believe it. Released in 1964, it is like Top Gun stripped of any action or interest whatsoever. Two long chunks of the movie are taken up with stock footage of fighter aircraft refueling in flight. There’s a dramatic sequence in which one of our courageous pilots may have crashed during a training flight—and they show absolutely no flying at all. Even the hecklers can’t do much with this utterly lame waste of celluloid. D.

Parts: The Clonus Horror. Did you see the 2005 movie The Island, starring Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge!) and Scarlett Johansson (He’s Just Not That Into You)? If so, then you’ve seen Parts, a low-budget 1979 sci-fi film about an unscrupulous corporation that runs a clone farm as a spare organ bank for the wealthy and powerful. There was a copyright lawsuit against The Island folks, in fact, and it settled before trial. This disc actually features an interview with the director of Parts, and he talks a little about that lawsuit, although I’ll bet he wasn’t supposed to under the terms of the settlement. Anyhoo, the movie has aspirations to serious social commentary, but it is rather weighted down by its low budget and bland acting. Peter Graves (Airplane!) shows up as a top bad guy (spawning numerous Biography jokes), and beloved Dick Sargent (TV’s Bewitched) is one of the evil doctors at Clonus. A solidly entertaining episode. B+.

He's Just Not That Into You

New review from The Movie Snob

He's Just Not That Into You (D). And let me say up front that there will be some general spoilers in this review--nothing too specific, but enough that you might prefer to skip it.

Anyway, I am not too into chick flicks, and the generally mediocre reviews did not make me particularly want to see this one. But then I read a review by a fellow named Ross Douthat that piqued my curiosity. He entitled his review "The Way We Live Now," and he thought the film was interesting for its unusually unflattering look at the "essentially Darwinian" nature of modern dating. Being fairly out of touch with that scene myself, I went to see what he was talking about. The movie's large cast of well-known actresses and perhaps less well-known actors wheel around each other in various combinations. There's a married couple, a long-time couple in which the guy "doesn't believe in marriage," and a bunch of other folks who want to be in couples but can't seem to manage it. The protagonist, Gigi, is a perky young thing who is so desperate to get attached that she will basically stalk a guy after a single mediocre date, somehow not realizing that this is the worst possible strategy she could devise. A friendly bartender breaks the earth-shattering news to her (repeatedly) that a guy's bad behavior (or his mere failure to call) should be taken at FACE VALUE. Also, vague "signs" that a guy is interested should not be given more weight than open neglect. Also, you should not base your dating strategy on a legend that your cousin's friend's college roommate found true love after chasing, or putting up with unmitigated crap from, some guy for umpteen years.

All of this seemed reasonably honest to me. So did a sordid subplot about a tawdry adultery. I may not have liked these people, but I believed what I was seeing. The kick in the teeth came at the end, when the movie trashed the honest-feeling stuff and started dropping happy endings on us like anvils. Not every character got one, admittedly -- a few were left out in the cold. But some characters underwent ridiculous changes of heart to bring about the desired Hollywood endings, and the wrap-ups generally trashed the seemingly solid advice previously dispensed by the affable bartender. Apparently Hollywood suspects that we can stand only so much truth about "the way we live now," and then we have to be cheered up with happy endings, no matter how phony. The movie chickened out of the hard truths it had worked so hard to establish, and it made me mad. Skip it.

Race to Witch Mountain

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Race to Witch Mountain (B-). This is the new remake of Disney's 1975 classic Escape to Witch Mountain. A UFO crashes in the Nevada desert, and government baddies are in hot pursuit of the footprint-leaving aliens who flee to nearby Las Vegas. Meanwhile, a down-on-his-luck cab driver (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Get Smart) picks up a couple of youngish teenagers who talk like aliens (you know -- overly formal, no contractions, that kind of thing) and have remarkable super powers. Oh, and there's a seemingly indestructible alien assassin chasing the kids too. Nonstop action ensues. It's not bad, but the action scenes are so poorly edited that you really can't tell what's going on. Tom Everett Scott (That Thing You Do!) has a small role as a government guy. AnnaSophia Robb (Because of Winn Dixie) is not bad as the more memorable of the two aliens, but I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Kim Richards, who had the role in the 1975 original.

Nim's Island

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Nim's Island (C). This movie should have been better than it was. A research scientist and his daughter Nim live an idyllic existence on a remote Pacific island, where she has befriended a sea lion, a lizard, and a pelican. She reads a lot, and she especially loves a series of books (novels?) by and about the heroic exploits of Indiana-Jones-like Alex Rover. Only "Alex Rover" is really Alexandra Rover, an agoraphobic and germophobic author in San Francisco. The scientist (Gerard Butler, 300) goes missing after he is out at sea alone in a bad storm, so Nim (Abigail Breslin, Raising Helen) emails "Alex Rover" (Jodie Foster, Napoleon and Samantha) for help. Alexandra, against her better judgment, decides to travel to Nim's Island. Despite the good cast, I didn't think the acting was particularly good, and somehow the movie sort of fell flat for me. But I imagine kids would be reasonably entertained by Nim's plight and the antics of her animal pals.

Settlers of Catan (game)

Hello, Gentle Readers!

Sorry the new content has been a little sparse lately. But now is a fine opportunity to put in a plug for the greatest of all board games, Settlers of Catan. Click here for an article about it in Wired magazine.