a lot going on in the world now, and i’m desperately looking for ways to escape it from time to time. judge me if you want to.

my homies Kiwi and Prometheus Brown both throw movie reviews up on their blogs from time to time. but those are intelligent brothers…me not so much, so i’m doing abbreviated reviews of all the movies i’ve seen in about the past month.

mad spoilers below.

reign over me
remarkably uneven. some parts of this flick are mad compelling, and other parts just feel so pointless. its overall message – that we should all try to be as open and communicative with the people we love all the time because you never know what’s gonna happen – is worthwhile, but executed kinda poorly. don cheadle, who is good in just about everything, is just average here. the movie really hinges on adam sandler’s performance, and when he’s channeling the isolation of his character, the movie really works. but sandler is not known for his acting chops – a reputation not at all unfounded, so when he’s less than stellar, the film stumbles over itself. a good sign though: at no point did i think he was gonna start chasing a giant invisible penguin, so sandler was able to at least separate himself from the goofy bro image he nurtured in the beginning of his career.

you don’t mess with the zohan
to my grand surprise, this is actually the better sandler movie. i saw this maybe a day or two before the most recent violence broke out in Gaza – so my opinion of it was formed then. i assumed this flick was going to be like the most offensive movie i had ever seen – but it is actually a level-headed mainstream opinion on israeli-palestinian conflict. it is in no way – NO WAY – leftist or progressive or radical – BUT, it has a far better macro-analytical view than most american elected officials. i know. i didn’t expect it either.

much of the humor is juvenile, and the cameos by mariah carey and dave matthews are gratuitous and a little stinky, but john turturro proves once again that he may be better when he’s not trying very hard. and the scenes where the israelis and palestinians sit around on a manhattan corner snapping on their wardrobes and talking shit about each others’ moms didn’t feel like movie fantasy at all. and if you were to take a step back and see sandler representing israel, turturro representing palestine, dave matthews representing the american military, and the old rich white guy as the united states…you actually get a well-reasoned plea for peace and less invasive american foreign policy. really.

talk to me
this is how i prefer to see don cheadle. all swagger and unapologetic righteousness. i know parts of it are true to life, but parts are not. boston’s own kasi lemmons slipped in things here and there to make elements of it fit better as a movie – but i ain’t mad. if i were to describe the plot to you here, it would sound very much like some movie-making cliches, and it could have easily been, but the pace of the movie and the performances from the leads – chiwetel ejiofor and cheadle -and taraji henson as the main supporting character all held something beneath the surface that lesser actors would not have had. and cedric the entertainer: that’s how you do a cameo – just stay out of the way…

tropic thunder
…unless you’re tom cruise in tropic thunder, in which case you need to be as in the way as possible, because he was one of the few bright spots in this movie. because we already know tom cruise is weird, having him in a fatsuit and bald cap dancing to ludacris is just that much more better.

but what was wack about this movie was, well, it was supposedly lampooning how seriously actors and movies take themselves considering how much more hard real life is than the movie business. but there was no effort put into making that rough real world anything like the real world. how did they start out in vietnam, but ended up among a militia all speaking mandarin chinese? why is the only person in that camp who speaks english a little boy? where did he learn english if he’s been living with this militia? why can robert downey jr’s awful awful attempt at speaking chinese trick the militia into thinking he’s actually chinese? (as someone who speaks chinese very poorly, let me tell you, downey’s chinese sounds like he just read it off google translator and there was not a single person who ever read the lines aloud to him correctly.)

as is the norm in hollywood flicks, the asian characters are just a huge mishmash of conveniences. i would say stereotypes, but it’s not really that, so much as they only exist as plot devices, not characters. there’s no attempt to make anything about any of them consistent, which means you can never forget the asian characters are written by clueless hollywood types, which means you can never completely lose yourself in the moment and just enjoy it. so thumbs down.

first sunday
ice cube can only play dudes who are down on their luck and need to accomplish some task before the end of the flick. that’s all he’s ever done in movies if you don’t count doughboy. so even knowing that by the end of the movie, this situation was going to be resolved peaceably, i still laughed mad times! tracy morgan should be getting a lot more roles – i know he’s already the host of scare tactics. katt williams took a tiny piece of his stand-up routine and turned it into a hilarious side character. and then that dude who used to host comicview was in it. but the story was awful. and the way it ended made no sense, it was like a rodney dangerfield movie.

jane austen book club
emily blount’s character – was her name purty? – is in the running for the least appealing movie character of all time. every time she appeared, i wanted the other characters to throw coffee on her bag or something to get her to leave.

while the other characters were not necessarily interesting, they at least didn’t make me feel like tearing my tv out of the wall. but there’s still not anyone really likeable in this movie. what was with that young woman and the fetish for women of color? goes from the black writer woman to the asian doctor woman (thanks for busting those stereotypes yo!) like she thinks it’s hip to be ethnic. gross.

after seeing this movie, i jumped on the internets to join the flaming fun, as i was sure i’d find all these webforums about how awful that movie was. but to my abject horror, my fellow interets-goers seemed to mostly like this movie. i didn’t realize everyone else on the internets was a middle-aged midwestern housewife. if that sounds unnecessarily mean-spirited, that’s because even having to think back to the fact that i wasted 2 hours of my life on this movie makes me angry. on to something else…

iron man
being enough of a nerd to know robert downey jr. is a great choice to play tony stark, i expected a lot. i got less than i expected, but overall it’s an enjoyable flick. i wish they woulda pressed the anti-war message a little harder, but i thought updating to reflect recent world events was a smart move. caught the ghostface cameo in the dvd extras. why would you ever cut ghostface out of anything? he’s at least as good an actor as gwenyth paltrow.

hancock
like another recent will smith action flick, i am legend, this started out really strong and ended kinda eh. the plot unfolded nicely until that amazing left turn came about charlize theron’s character. how unexpected was that? i was thrilled!

but then it was like they just wanted to get the movie over with and everything seemed to unfold in like 20 minutes. in my head, i expected hancock to turn out to be a supervillain unbeknown to himself…which i still think would have been a better ending. it was not to be. but they left it open to do a sequel, and there is a strong enough backstory to make a second movie better than the first was.

college road trip
i don’t know if getting older has made me soft that i can’t dislike any movie anymore, but i thought this wasn’t as bad as you might think a martin lawrence-raven simone buddy road trip comedy might be. overall, i actually thought it was pretty good. the only thing that really bothered me was…what the hell was the deal with the pet pig? there was never a point at which his existence moved the story along at all. couldn’t they have done away with the pig entirely? the only explanation would be that they were hoping to do some merchandising after the movie, and nobody want a martin lawrence action figure, so they figured having a pig might help them make some cash.

the perfect holiday
charlie murphy as a rapper? and why would you cast katt williams in a movie just to not give him any funny lines? pass.

meet dave
people just want to hate on eddie murphy because he isn’t making movies like coming to america and beverly hills cop anymore – oh and turns out he’s a giant prick in real life.

so it is supposedly a comedy, but i don’t think i laughed even once. but overall, i can’t say i hated it or anything, because unlike tropic thunder and a lot of american movies, it did not offend me as a human being. it was slightly offensive to me as someone who wanted to laugh during a comedy. ssssso…as we’re grading on a curve – compared to most american flicks, it’s probably like a B+.

i know who killed me
fuck this movie.

made of honor
i’m all for seeing a mainstream romantic comedy from time to time. even one with patrick mcdempsey. even though i saw and hated enchanted (mad xenophobic, but that’s a topic for another post). i am not closed-minded about so-called “chick flicks.”

but when the love interest of the main character is a self-righteous asshole, then i lose interest. i find it despicable that she berated complete strangers for selling alligator skin, but wouldn’t say anything to her friend for eating shrimp, or even her fiance for killing deer and boars? you know, to make real change, you have to start with those around you. yelling on strangers don’t do any good. especially small businesspeople just trying to make a living. learn a lesson.

pretty woman
i don’t think i have ever seen this movie before. it pretty much was everything everyone says it was. i can see why julia roberts still has all this goodwill from moviegoers even tho she hasn’t done a good flick since this. i remember being in 5th grade and seeing commercials and thinking richard gere looked so old, but actually he looks good in this movie. good for him.

creepy to see george costanza as an attempted rapist. i would say a flaw was there was no attempt to bring about restorative justice for all the bad deeds done by characters in this movie, as tho we should just let everything slide because the girl and the guy find each other in the end. i know it’s fantasy and you’re not supposed to think that hard, but still…

the other boleyn girl
generally uninteresting, except for the fact that i remembered elements of it from european history class in high school…and i kinda got a geekthrill anytime something happened i kind of remembered. but what bothered me about it was how they would use phrases that sounded like modern-day slang in what is supposed to be like the 16th century. i have no idea if they used phrases like “you heard what i said” and “go on and tell yourself that” back in the day…but don’t they feel like anachronisms?

anyway, tune in next year when i review ferris beuller’s day off, chocolat, and a bunch of other movies that are no longer in theaters. peace.

Tags: movies

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 12:04 AM and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.