Hancock - no.
Wanted - yes.
Olympics? VERY yes.

What? You want more? Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman are great. Seriously. <3’s and butterflies. Most of the time I even like Will Smith. But the movie doesn’t work. It goes from funny to wtf to emo over it’s scant 90-some minutes.

Wanted is based on the Millar mini. I’ve read a couple. I’m going to get the rest now. It was a little nutty, a little funny and a lot of action. I was excited from start to finish.

Also worth not noting is that my favorite area theater was sold a few months ago to some new company. They switched to Coke products. Coke is horrible. The service has declined and it’s the only iMax in 100 miles.

I love the Olympics. Well summer Olympics anyway. Which is odd considering I was an avid skier every summer for over 10 years. Kerri Walsh and Misty May are ridiculously amazingly impossibly good. 84th consecutive match win, 2 short of their previous record of 86. Both have over 90 career tournament wins. They are, without question, the best players in the world - and they’re going to China.

8.8.08, bitches.

It would seem that I am in the minority on this one, but I did not enjoy the latest Harry Potter movie. Maybe it was just the aggregate rottenness of the day, but it just didn’t work for me. I figured catching a 12:30 show on a Thursday would net me a less-than-full theatre, but alas I am a complete idiot. At least one bus full of little brats was in the parking lot already and apparently they had been there for some time as I was 20 minutes early.

Needless to say the place was packed full of obnoxiousness and my seat was less than desirable. I love Star Cinema, but man-o-man do not sit along the fringes. The speaker directly above/behind me was an order of magnitude louder than the others and slightly out of phase. So every piece of dialog was delivered with a really loud echo.

Then there’s the 3D. The best scene in the movie was completely ruined by the stupid 3D. If I thought the overall movie was as good as the last four had been I’d bother seeing it in a non-iMax.

Oh well, Half-Blood Prince & Deathly Hollows are what? 2 years away? At least someone slapped some sense into Emma finally.

Because not all entries can have even remotely witty titles.

Decent movie, really. Best of the three at any rate as this one had a recognizable plot. Anyway, good “official” start to the summer movie season.

Tomorrow-ish I’ll go see Oceans 13.

A week later than intended I managed to catch an iMax showing of Spider-Man 3…

By my unofficial count, there were no less than 950 crying scenes. It was ridiculous. Which is unfortunate as the movie, outside the fucking emo, wasn’t horrible. At least from a CGI perspective.

As is his modus operandi over the run of this series Raimi ham-fisted the material and rendered barely adequate caricatures of the “real” people from the pages. I tolerated the organic web-shooters fiasco (a friend of mine ran that website!) but the Gwen Stacy thing bugs the living crap out of me. Ben Parker’s death formed the motivation for Peter to become a “hero” and to use his gifts to help people. The death of Gwen Stacy, however, truly changed the way Peter saw those gifts and crystalized the oft-quoted axiom: with great power, comes great responsibility. This moment is a pivotal one not just for Peter, but for the medium itself! Ignoring the story in favor of one that will get more teen girls and itty-bitty children in the theater is detestable, at best.

Instead of manufactured teen angst we could have had a movie with actual emotion and relevance for the viewer. Running away from this opportunity is tragic. Especially given that Raimi COULD have done a meaningful story given the unparalleled financial success of his little trilogy.

Note: The Venom and Sandman CGIs were fine. The Venom stuff, despite some whiners, is pretty close to the page and I found that I was genuinely impressed by their willingness to go that route. The Sandman stuff was wrong, but only “a little”. I don’t recall a point in time where he ever flew off as a cloud of dust.

The rotten tomatoes score is pretty close to how I feel. It was passable and rousing for a summer popcorn movie. Beyond that it remains in my memory only because of its failure.

Another weekend-long movie binge is behind me and I want to get the fuck out of the office fast as it’s a Monday.

Saturday I headed on over to the iMax @ Star Cinema. Boy was I pleased with that decision. The movie in and of itself wasn’t the best thing ever, but the sheer spectacle of it combined with 3D goggles and an iMax screen was just overwhelming. I can’t see how Superman will ever measure up in another medium… Spacey’s rendition of Lex Luther is as good if not a scosh better than Rosenbaum’s character on Smallville - whom I consider, at this point, to be the definitive Lex. At least as far as live action goes. The rest of the cast/movie is meh. Sorry kids but Singer & Spacey carried the flic as far as I’m concerned. You didn’t do a BAD job either, which is unfortunate. If you had I could just point out some stupid thing and say “hahaha, you suck” and we could both just move on. Instead you end up just being fairly expensive props.

Sunday rolled around and I made my first foray to the cesspit that is Marcus theaters in months to catch that flic people are all talking about. {Insert “meh” here} I won’t go so far as to say it was shitty shitty stinky farty smelly, but it certainly wasn’t entertaining. Even Keira was annoying which shouldn’t even be physically possible. Orlando did his level best to act himself out of a wet paper sack and failed miserably…again. Not even the Depp could save this train wreck. *ring* *ring* er…hello? Oh, Dead Man’s Chest it’s for you. It’s A COHESIVE FUCKING PLOT calling. Apparently you slipped it a roofie, stole it’s car and left town. You cheeky bastard.

In betwix the main stage was nestled a diamond in the rough. I speak, of course, of the Cinemax HD Saturday premiere of Wedding Crashers. Two words: FUN NY. This was my first viewing and I laughed just about the entire way through. Rachel McAdams was lovely, as always and the Wilson/Vaughn duet played perfectly. Kudos chaps. Kudos.

Yeah, so I saw Bloodrayne…

Judging by The Numbers, the readership of this site is the approximate number of people who have done the same.

If there isn’t a “movie” division of the war crimes tribunal there ought to be. This isn’t “so bad it’s good” or anything like that. This was just plain bad. Note the use of “movie” throughout - consider them to be giant air-quotes.

The entire “movie” was a mishmash of scenes only connected by the fact that you saw the same people in similar outfits. I like Kristanna Loken, I really do - but what the flying fuck woman? At what point do you not walk the fuck off set and never return? So disappointing, this movie COULD have been awesome. Hot half-vampire chick that (per the game) fights nazzis? Where the fuck is THAT movie? Blade meets Buffy meets Indiana Jones. It could have been a campy little mid-wintertime romp. Instead it was a giant, smelly turd.

At some point a second, seemingly positive, review was posted at Rotten Tomatoes, upping this thing to a 6% vs 4%. Someone received their cashier’s check I’d wager.

Don’t even get me started on Ben Kingsly. I wouldn’t start making room on the Oscar shelf just yet…
Apparently our man Uwe also directed the Dungeon Siege Movie. Yet another excellent game I’ll never be able to play again because of this stupid fuck.

WHO KEEPS GIVING HIM MONEY? FUCK. STOP IT ALREADY!

PS - Kristanna, thank you for the ridiculous sex scene. You have nice boobies. That is all.

Drove over to the west si-eede Saturday for an UltraScreen presentation of Serenity.

“Wow.”

Let that be synonymous with whatever over-the-top expletive that tickeles your particular fancy. “Damn” is also acceptable.

I won’t spoil anything in the plot, but I will say that the movie picks up a few months after the last episode of Firefly. Needless exposition is kept at the bare minimum, if you haven’t seen the show it shouldn’t be much of an issue. Except for the fact that your a complete gibbering idiot and should be lanced from the gene pool like an unsightly mole.

The writing is pure Whedon, for better and worse. If you don’t read at the 11th grade level at the very least you probably won’t get some of the humor and may confuse that with an in-joke. You’d be wrong, of course, but you can refer to the mole initiative described above. Don’t misunderstand, there are some in-jokes, but that’s staple Whedon and quite frankly the fans and cast deserve at least SOME self-referential funnies. Screw the rest of you bastards.

I’m not ashamed to say that more than once I was genuinely shocked, saddened and elated by this movie. Again, staple Whedon. When you write story and dialog with actual emotion in it you will evoke actual human emotion in your viewer. I know, crazy.

Anywho, it’s currently sitting at a very solid 80% on Rotten Tomatoes with the entirety of the negative reviews being ridiculous in their stupidity. “It’s a TV show, ZOMG SUX!” … idiot. The other portion of the negative reviews cut out the middle-man and go straight for the “it’s a movie that GEEKS like” and therefore must suck. Yeah, keep spankin’ the monkey to mindless garbage like Desperate Housewives you mass-market douchebag.

Bitter, table for me? Yeah, I suppose so. Serenity should never have existed. It should have been the second season of Firefly. Such is the curse of shows that expect the audience to be smarter than the average brook trout, or 3x smarter than the average Fox programming executive.

update: 2nd place for the weekend, 10m vs Flight Plan’s 15. It showed on 1300 fewer theateres though, take that with a grain of salt. I’ll see it again next weekend, probably won’t drive back across town though. Stupid ghetto east-side

It was too hot to do anything this weekend, so I cranked up the AC and watched the telly. Then I cranked up the AC in the car, sat in the glorious AC of the theater and watched a movie there. Back to the homestead, AC and more movies.

Chuck and the Chocolate Factory was a fine summer movie. I doubt it’ll find a place on my DVD wall of hugeness. It is far, FAR less creepy than the hype would have you believe and quite frankly I don’t find that to be a good thing. The production was high-quality througout and Roald Dahl gave this movie his complete support. I’ve never read the book, so take that for what it’s worth… Shocker, Johnny Depp does a good job playing an eccentric, larger-than-life lunatic.

On to the actual marathon…

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Short version: zomgwtfbbq.

Long version: zomgwtfbbq (times infinity)

In all seriousness, great flic. I walked in with zero expectations or even hopes for the movie. But wow.

I’ve never been a big FF fan, with the X4 mini and Ultimate FF runs being the only recent exceptions. The FF origin story was expertly told with very little meddling with canon. The cast melded perfectly and everyone played their roles with precision. Julian McMahon shows some serious acting chops as Doc Doom and Michael Chiklis captured the broody Thing persona as if he had lived the role his entire life. The article about him in a recent Maxim lends me to believe the nightmarish make-up ordeal he had to go through every morning for the part gave him no end of inspiration. They spared no expense making Sue Storm into a sexpot, but with Jessica Alba playing the part it’d be hard not to. Relative newcomer Chris Evans did a good job playing the Torch, the relationship between he and the Thing was executed well. Interesting how the two strongest performances came from the folks who have their own shows on FX… plug: Watch the Shield and nip/tuck or your life will indeed be forfeit.

The movie is pretty predictable, but then again all comic movies should be given that they’re usually not original works to begin with. It’s not as if you didn’t know how Spider-Man would end. Marvel has definately set up another strong franchise. If they can figure out a way to bring FF-class baddies into a good story in the next movie remains to be seen, there’s only so many times you can dip into the Doom well, and I don’t think Galactus translates well to Joe Average.

The movie is ridiculously funny, I can’t count how many times the entire theater burst into laughter at honest to goodness funny moments. Not *groan* how lame, or kick-in-the-nuts schlock either - Actual humor. Kudos to the writing staff and the actors for acing the execution.

Oh, before I forget: They’re making a sequel to The Transporter… I’m not exactly sure what to make of that. Personally I enjoyed the first one, but I’m infamous for collecting shitty movies. The screenplay was written by Luc Beson. Which gives me hope as he did the original as well. Again - I liked the 5th Element too, so take that all with a heaping large grain of salt.

Like most other beings of limited-or-greater sentience I went out to see the thrilling conclusion to the prequel trilogy, Star Wars: Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith.

Upside: It didn’t suck.
Downside: 1/3 is a good batting average - not so much for a movie trilogy.

The movie was well-plotted and the actors from across the pond did their level best to make the material work. Notes to Ian and Ewan: You are k-rad, I don’t blame YOU for the toe-curling, ear-cringing dialog. Portman could have been swapped in with a mannequin or statue and delivered an equal level of emotion. I don’t understand how she can turn off talent like that. If this was episode 1 I’d beg you to take your soul with you to the set for the next two. Hayden Christensen, my poor Annie, being only slightly less annoying than “that stupid kid from episode one” is a tough cross to bear. Sucks to be you I guess.

Was it just me or did the effects seem to be completely BLAH this time ’round? I was completely unimpressed by the whole spectacle. I guess once you reach a certain point with the graphics it becomes a matter of plausibility, not if you can or can’t see the wires. Is it the Matrix effect? Everything in the original was believable, yet complete fantasy. By the time Revolutions rolled there was just no room left in my plausibility tank.

Oh well, it’s all over now until the destined-for-cancellation TV series. The rumors are plentiful, mostly pointing to a show set beetween the old and new trilogies centering on the daring debauchery of Boba Fett. Protip: Boba Fett is EVIL. He’s not Vader. Making him some sort of tragic hero will fail and fail miserably.

Give the people behind Clone Wars a 300% raise and comission a 12-episode season of 30-minute shows. As long as it’s not given to Fox it’ll be big. Sno-Cones in hell big, mark my words. Grab the DVDs of that bad boy people. It is the shizzle, or whatever new catch-phrase the kids are beating to death these days.