2012 Review #30: Battleship

  My Grade

B-

 **SPOILER ALERT for the whole review**
I'm hearing a lot of griping about this movie. People are saying that it's essentially Transformers in the water. It's a solid argument I won't lie. It could have easily been called AquaFormers or something along those lines. But alas, this is NOT a Transformers movie. Thank God. Yes there are certainly similarities. Alien life forms come down our way and want to murder us all. Or do they? Battleship never actually addresses the reasoning for this alien invasion. In fact, in the movie, the humans technically fire first, creating an all out war. The aliens never speak in the film therefore we never find out their motives. What we do know though, is that they have landed several of their ships in the Hawaiian waters where there is a big Naval competition going on. Great timing huh? We know they are attempting to communicate with their home turf up in space using satellites and beacons that the human's created to attempt to contact the aliens to begin with. And now the remaining few Naval officers have to stop this from happening. Which is tough, because the aliens have thrown a giant force field up blocking in 3 of the Navy's ships, boats, whatever you want to call them and have blocked out the rest of the fleet. Two of three ships are destroyed so it's left to just the one led by pretty boy Taylor Kitcsh (TV's Friday Night Lights, John Carter) who basically JUST joined the Navy. Go figure.

So what we have here is the same setup we pretty much always get in these big budget end of the world alien invasion movies. The most unlikely of heroes will rise from the ashes where everyone expects them to fail but end of saving the day. Listen folks, if you didn't expect the lead character to save everyone and be rewarded for it in the end, then you are crazy...or you don't see a lot of movies. You know the formula of the film, you know exactly what's going to happen. With movies like this, it completely takes away any tension. Battleship also offers little story, but in my opinion that's a good thing. Transformers 2 and 3 tried to pack in to big of a story and it fell flat on it's face. Battleship at least knows it's a mindless action movie so every ounce of plot is given to us in the first (and awful) first 20 minutes of the movie. The final 2 hours is what you are here for. The action. The shit blowing up. The aliens getting wiped out. The human debris, you know...the works.

And with that, Battleship truly delivers. When you take away the need to think in a movie it becomes fun. This movie requires you to remove that thinking cap and just enjoy what's happening. The action in this movie was done surprisingly well. A movie like this always runs the serious risk of over doing it, and going way over the top. Battleship never falls victim to this, at least I didn't think so. All the action scenes were necessary to further the movie along. There was no excess of crap. The movie pulled itself back and toned down when it needed to. It continually set us up for the next big explosion. And when the action happened, it was bad ass. I was so completely entertained. The aliens didn't talk (like the Transformers do) so there was no stupid exchanges between them and the humans. It was just shoot and kill and that's it. The visual effects in all the battle scenes were awesome! When we saw the aliens faces and hands though, I thought they looked a little to video gamey (they looked like something out of Halo or Mass Effect or something). But eh, we barely saw them that much so it wasn't a big deal.

The movie had it's fare share of totally cheesy moments, mainly anything involving Brooklyn Decker and her band of misfits on the mainland trying to stop the aliens from sending their signal. The movie could have done without most of those scenes if I'm being honest. But overall, it has likeable characters even if they are a bit hammy from time to time. You kind of root for them. While we are on the character subject, if you are looking for a movie with Liam Neeson (Taken, The Grey), the new proverbial bad ass or hunky vampire Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood) then you might want to look elsewhere. Neeson has virtually no role in the action of this movie. He is merely an extended cameo here to give certain story elements to our main character. He does nothing bad ass here. Skarsgard dies about 40 minutes in. I was surprised they didn't give Liam Neeson anything to do though. His character sits outside this force field with a huge fleet at his command but they attempt nothing. Yes, I know the force field kills on impact...but they didn't even fire a shit load of missles and bullets at the thing...could have made for a fun scene and would have given Neeson SOMETHING cool to do. Guess not.

Anyway, Battleship is not a good movie, quality wise. You can't expect it to be. It won't be winning any awards, nor is that the intention of a movie like this. But this movie is a seriously fun, entertaining thrill ride. It's chock full of excitement and plenty of solid action to go around. It has an engaging lead actor in Kitsch who does really well in carrying the film. It has a lot of great elements and is a worthy film to lose some brain cells to for a little over 2 hours. You won't be made fun of for seeing it...I don't think. I'm going to be crucified by the comic book nerds for saying this...but I kind of found this movie to be more fun than "The Avengers". Uh oh...I'm a dead man.

Oh and are you wondering if this has ANYTHING to do with the board game it's based off of? Um..no not really. There is one cool scene though where the pay homage to the game. Where they are shooting blind because their radar is down so they are using a grid system and firing almost blindly into the ocean to hit their target. Kind of like then game huh?

2012 Review #29: The Dictator

 It's been a while since I posted anything on here. I've been on vacation from work you see and I just got distracted way to easily way to many times and have not had the energy to post new movie reviews. I'm still on my vacation and I'm still lacking the enthusiasm to post anything but I don't want to fall behind. So these next two movie reviews will be short and will not be formatted the same as usual. Call me lazy, call me whatever you want. I don't care. Just be warned, the next couple reviews will not be my best.  So without further ado.

The Dictator stars Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Sweeney Todd) who I'm sure most of you remember as Borat a few years back. Now when Borat first came out it was unlike any comedy most of us had experienced before. It was partially scripted, partially unscripted and ad-libed. A lot of the people he encountered in the movie were not aware exactly what was going on, so the reactions were genuine. The movie was raunchy, foul mouthed, and just plain insane but it was fresh and damn hilarious. There has been talks of a Borat 2...but only time will tell if that is actually true.

The Dictator is one of Cohen's many characters he has portrayed in the past, but now he's one of the few who get's his own movie. The story follows his dictator character who travels to America but is then kidnapped and has his signature beard shaven and then thrown back into New York city trying to convince people he is the real dictator. Oscar winner Ben Kinglsey (Gandhi, Hugo) plays his right hand man who betrays him and swaps in a fake dictator to take the place of Cohen. OK it's not big on story, but obviously that's not what you want from a movie like this. You want funny.

You know what though? I didn't think it was all that funny either. I mean yes, it certainly had it's moments, but they seemed sporadic and inconsistent. Since Borat debuted we have seen a handful of raunchy, out there comedies and The Dictator gives us nothing new. And it's completely scripted too, it doesn't have any of that off the cusp, unplanned moments like Borat had. The writing here was not good, just a lot of poor joke telling. I mean, we have seen plenty of dick jokes, plenty of lesbian and gay jokes, plenty of crude humor about having sex with many women, blah blah blah. It just wasn't funny. It wasn't awkward either. One of the best parts of Borat was that it was incredibly uncomfortable to sit through, but in a good way.

I don't know folks, if you are looking for a good comedy to see right now, I could not honestly suggest The Dictator, but you are your own people and you have your own thoughts. Everyone's sense of humor is different.

2012 Review #28: Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows

Rated PG-13

1 Hour 43 Minutes

Starring

Johnny Depp

Michelle Pfeiffer

Helena Bonham Carter

Eva Green

Belle Heathcote

Chloe Grace Moretz

Jackie Earle Haley

Storyline

An imprisoned vampire, Barnabas Collins, is set free and returns to his ancestral home, where his dysfunctional descendants are in need of his protection. Remake of a cult classic TV soap.

Rotten Tomatoes Grade

41%

"The visuals are top notch but Tim Burton never finds a consistent rhythm, mixing campy jokes and gothic spookiness with less success than other Johnny Depp collaborations."

My Grade

C-

**spoiler alert**

I've never seen the original show, as it was a tad bit before my time. I know it's a cult classic and I know a lot of people had issues with Tim Burton remaking it into a feature length film. I think they had a good reason to feel this way. The movie shows that there was a lot of source material in the show and they attempted to pack a lot in to the film. It's a very busy movie yet at the same time not much really goes on, and it never really takes off into anything special. This is the eighth collaboration between Burton and Oscar nominee Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd, Sleepy Hollow) and I think I have to finally cave in and say...enough is enough. They obviously work well together, that goes without saying, but it's growing very tiresome now.

The movie is all over the place with story and characters. It has to much to incoporate into a less then 2 hour movie. I feel like they didn't do the original characters any justice and made them all a little to campy and silly. This was kind of like the Brady Bunch movie mixed with maybe the Adams Family movie. They tried to make a funny story out of it but it came off as almost uncomfortable. Some of the characters were clearly meant to be major parts of the story but were just left on the sidelines most of the time. Take the Vicki character. Supposed to be the love interest for Barnabus but with the excpetion of the beginning of the film, she only pops up for a minute or two. Then they decide to give her a back story almost at the end of the film and I was like "Um, what?!"Same with Chloe Moretz character. There's no sign for the whole movie that she's a werewolf, but at the very end...she turns into one. And has the cheesiest line in the movie, "Woof". I'm sure this is what her character was in the show, but come on, that was ages ago, a lot of today's youth won't know this.

None of the performances were all that engaging. Usually Burton has a knack for crafting unique, twisted, quirky performances from his actors, but not this time. His wife, Oscar nominee Helena Bonham Carter (The King's Speech, Harry Potter series) is somwhere between "normal" and "strange" and that doesn't work well with her. She plays creepy very well, but she wasn't put to good use here. Depp is a very reliable actor, but even he could not save this film. He does character work better than most people, but this particular character was a lame blend of Jack Sparrow and maybe Sweeney Todd. This version of Barnabus was not fun, cool or entertaining.

The whole movie was a few notches below the line of being just mediocre for me. I know this isn't a well written review, that could be do in part to the fact that I'm in a bad mood today. But this movie was just so generic and boring. It didn't have the energy I was hoping it would have in it's story and characters. Now the movie looked incredible. Beautifully dark and haunting set pieces. Perfect costuming. Realistic looking visual effects. It nailed the techinal side of the film. But the pieces of the puzzle did not come together neatly because of it's weak story and un charasmatic performances. It was dull. Maybe that means I'm dull...you be the judge. Be a hater, I don't care. :-)

The River Cancelled by ABC

Well bad news for fans of the Oren Peli/Steven Spielberg TV horror series "The River". Yesterday ABC took the axe to the show that ran for 8 episodes at the end of this TV season. This does not come to much of a surprise though. The show continuously had very weak numbers in the ratings department (averaging around 3 million people a week) and that's not a good sign if you want a second season. It also received mixed reviews and didn't get that cult following it might have needed for ABC to possibly think of giving it another go. But let's face it...they never intended to keep it around. The network is kind of famous for going through shows like clock work.

No word yet however if Netflix will be picking up the show. It was reported a few months back that they were in "talks" to give The River some life with a second season, but that news has been dead ever since it was announced. Who knows, this could be a good sign that they will. ABC would have to cancel it for it to happen so...I guess time will tell.

On other ABC news, they have also cancelled the Ashley Judd thriller "Missing". On a positive note though, they have renewed the TV guilty pleasure of the year "Revenge" for a second season, which I am really excited for!!

"Community" Renewed for Season 4!!

It is official ladies and germs! NBC has graciously renewed the struggling comedy "Community" for a fourth season. It will get 13 episodes in the 2012-2013 TV season. Even better news is that it was not announced that this will be the final season of the show. Not like "30 Rock" who did get a confirmed final season. So there is still a chance for the "six seasons and a movie" Abed has spoken out before.

You don't need me to rant about Community, I've done that enough on my blog. One of my more read articles is about the show, and you can find the link for that on the right side of my blog under the "most popular articles" section.

This is just very exciting news! After all the rumors floating around, which now that I think of it, were never confirmed by anyone from NBC...it's nice to know we will still get more of Greendale Community College next season. I'm also very hopeful that we may get more seasons from them as NBC has not said it's the last. So fingers crossed folks! This is very good news! No word yet though if Chevy Chase or Dan Harmon will be coming back for next season. Given their recent "feud" who knows what will happen with that.

"Community" will end it's 3rd season next Thursday May 17th with a 90 minute finale! 3 new episodes back to to back!