Reviews

This movie is beautiful to watch. The visual and sound aspects of the movie are perfect, quite frankly. The script, though, is awful. It almost seems as if it was written on the fly. They really needed a quality filmmaker like, say, Bob Zemeckis who can write a coherent script that makes sense rather than this horrifyingly bad nonsense that does great injustice to the characters who have been in the franchise since the beginning and are pivotal to the overall story. The movie seems obsessed with new characters and other fluff that has no bearing on the plot. They could have done away with all of the CGI animals and half of the cast because they had zero impact on the story.

There was no backstory on Snoke or Kylo or Rey, or Holdo. There was no connective tissue to the characters that explained what the heck they were doing there or how they connected or what led up to movie. How does Rey suddenly get jedi powers and best Luke when she had virtually no training or awareness of the Force? How did Kylo and Snoke become student and master? How does Leia suddenly develop the ability to survive a direct hit to the bridge and float her way back to the ship and get inside without depressurizing the ship? And, more importantly, how does Luke change from a Jedi master in to a wimpy, suicidal hermit who is a mere shadow of the man we saw in Return of the Jedi? And why the heck would you kill him off? And in such a nonsensical way. Are you crazy?

The movie seems obsessed with political correctness and SJW matters while it ignores the basics of what makes a great movie. I welcome seeing women in the cockpits of fighters and in other useful roles but they saturated the ranks of the extras with so many that it came across as an affectation. It was silly. I rather liked Rose but her story was inconsequential. Not because she was a woman but because the script writer(s) really didn't do a very good job. And Phasma? She was so thoroughly under-utiIized that she seemed like decoration. A two-minute decoration.

I recall JJ saying that the movie didn't do as well as it should have because of sexism. Uh, no, JJ, it's because the script was badly planned and poorly written. You ruined Star Trek and now you're ruining Star Wars because you spend too much time on superficial stuff and not enough on the script. I'm so glad that I blew off watching this movie in the theater and waited until I could get the DVD really cheap. I'm done with Disney's mishandling what George Lucas spent a lifetime building. I probably won't even bother spending money directly on any future Star Wars movies unless things change for the better script-wise. There are directors who know how to make great movies. I suggest that you find them.

Rogue One is definitely a well-made movie, very good acting, and is absolutely worth your time and money to go see in the theater. This film proves without a doubt that George Lucas left his baby in good hands. This is a great movie to take the entire family to see. I'm pretty sure that the kids will love it. Go see it, you'll be glad that you did.

This was, at least in my opinion, the most realistic Star Wars film. It just seems real in many respects. It might have helped that there aren't any Muppets or Ewoks but whatever.

The story takes a decided turn in perspective to the guy who actually made the Death Star happen. A sort of Oppenheimer-esque plot, as it were. And the goal of the Alliance becomes acquiring the plans to the Death Star that were integral to the original Star Wars movie.

Of course, there are aspects of the movie that cause it to not shine quite as brightly as it could have. In the first place, it's one of many films that are built on a formula that made the original movie so memorable. This makes it somewhat predictable and, well, boring in places. For instance, I could see the requisite three-part epic battle coming a mile away. That is, the big special effects battle in space, the battle going on down on the planet with the troops who landed with our heroes and the third battle going on in the center of the action between the heroes and the bad guy.

The other problems, there are two, that are pretty much built in to the movie are that:

1) Since we learned that the plans were successfully transmitted to the alliance at the beginning of A New Hope, the filmmakers had to pin the suspense on to how they did it rather than 'if'. It's sort of like watching a historical movie like the American Revolution. You know how it turns out.

2) Since none of the principles in this movie are in A New Hope, I was virtually certain that they'd have to all be killed off before the end. This is something that occurred to me almost immediately so if I can tell, probably everyone else can too.

So, the movie is a little boxed in with these restrictions. There's very little surprise in the movie and that's more than a little bit of a let down.

Still, as I said previously, it's a very well done movie that kept me entertained for the most part. There are plenty of homages to A New Hope and, of course, they found a way to slip a C3P0 and R2D2 cameo in towards the end. They were also able to bring Princess Lea, Governor Tarkin and some of the alliance fighters from A New Hope in to this movie with the use of CGI. Putting the faces of Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing on other actors was a little creepy but it took me by surprise how good it was. The only real issue I had about it was that Peter Cushing (original Tarkin) was only 5' 11" and The Rogue One Tarkin is 6' 4" so Guy Henry (new Tarkin) kind of towered over the other Imperials. That might not be noticeable to a lot of people but it really stood out for me.

First of all, yes, it's a pretty awful movie. I'm one of those people who don't try to figure things out. Rather, I like to be surprised so I just sit back and enjoy the surprises as they come. So, the only real surprise about who the killer was turned out to be that even I could figure it out. It didn't come to me in the beginning. The thing is, the only thing that would have really made the movie shine was to keep us in suspense about who the Cusp was. But, no. The thing about the original movie that kept us in suspense was Jennifer Lopez's character figuring out where the bad guy's killing jar, so to speak, was located. This movie tried to emulate that formula but it just fails to keep the suspense. I mean, who cares now that we know who the bad guy is? Tessie is a very beautiful woman but she seemed to be positioned frequently as a runway model. 'See my great figure?' And the movie got to be such a yawner that when Maya and Harris were together I kept going 'no, no, don't do a gratuitous love scene! NO!' Fortunately, we were spared that until the very end.

The helicopter figured prominently in the movie. It probably consumed a big part of the budget. But it was just weird with Harris perched on the outside of it as it was over the chemical plant, then over a body of water then suddenly it's over a stadium which it eventually lands in. The killer was an EMT tech, then a police officer so when did he get the ability to fly a helicopter? Kind of a plot hole there. Then, during the credits, in kind of a bizarre homage to The Shining, we see beautiful scenery with the helicopter's shadow plainly visible.

Some of the special effects were kind of neat, though. I liked how they showed Maya when she used her mystical power that she got from being killed six times. Maya just slinking down a corridor with screens representing memories and picking one up seemingly randomly was pretty cool.

Overall, I'd definitely recommend that you pass on this movie. Even if you liked the first one, it bares almost no resemblance to it. And, of course, the original had a good script, a fairly good cast and a bigger budget. This one just didn't have the money to do a proper job of it but even if they had more money, I doubt that it would have made that much of a difference. It's sort of watchable which made me sit through until the end but overall, it's rather boring in so many places that maybe I was just watching the entire thing hoping to see Tessie take off some clothing. Even that was disappointing.

I was neither surprised nor disappointed by Jurassic World. It's very well done, no question. However, as with most sequels, it doesn't have that certain something that the original had. It does, however, have the formula that made the original so good. Therefore, the entire movie is largely predictable. We know who will be eaten, we know that the kids will end up out in the field with the dinosaurs, we know that the male and female (adult) leads will go off in to the sunset together even though there's friction in the beginning, and on and on and on...YAWN.

The one thing that the movie DID have that was worthwhile, I guess, was that Owen knew how to treat the raptors with respect and bond with them. That was the overriding message and they maintained it very well. Good moral message. Let the bad guy be the decoy and get eaten while you sneak out of the room, but, treat the animals like your buds. Got it.

There were some gems, of course. The final dino battle was good and had an interesting twist. I particularly liked how the T-Rex regarded the raptor as a kind of comrade in arms and then walked away. Nice touch, that. I half expected some kind of goofy love story to spring from it, and am glad that it took the high road, so to speak.

All in all, it's a worthy effort with some fun twists and turns that can derail the predictability at times. Ideally, if you were a kid when the original came out and now have kids of your own, then you'll have a great time because you'll know when you can leave to go to the bathroom (yes, it's that predictable) but the kids will be mesmerized by the dinosaurs. Win-win.

Kick Ass 2 is a pretty good sequel, as sequels go. It's obvious from the start, though, that it isn't nearly as good as the original. Of course, that's true of most sequels. I've seen R.I.P.D., another movie I like, referred to as a rip-off of Men In Black. If that's fair game, then it's also fair to say that Kick Ass 2 is a rip-off of Mystery Men. That is, lots of ordinary folks who dress up like super heroes and try, in a vigilante sort of way, to fight crime and general bad behavior together. The rip-offs are, at least to me, inconsequential. Meaning that it doesn't bother me but it's worth noting nevertheless.

The movie is entertaining although not consistently so. It gets a wee bit boring here and there. There is also a certain amount of predictability. Hit Girl facing off with Mother Russia in the finale, you could see it coming fairly earlier on. But, it was something to look forward to. Chloe is endlessly fun to watch as Hit Girl. And, the fact that she's turning in to a beautiful young woman makes the movie more interesting. She's certainly the star of this particular movie (as well as the original) and I can see the franchise morphing in to Hit Girl movies. She's managed to steal the show from big names like Cage and Carrey and Leguizamo already.

The basic plot is that Kick Ass has inspired many others to pursue a life of donning costumes and crime-stopping. Hit Girl promises her guardian Marcus that she won't be Hit Girl any longer so Kick Ass is left by himself but she recommends he join a team which he does. The leader of the team is played surprisingly well by Jim Carrey who embraced the chameleon quality of good actors and literally disappeared in to the part so effectively that I couldn't tell that it was him until he got unmasked.

But there's trouble brewing on the horizon. Chris D'Amico, the son of the big bad guy who ate a bazooka round at the end of the first movie, has vowed revenge on Kick Ass. Of course, his mom got rid of his Red Mist costume and when he inadvertently kills her, he assumes a new identity using her leather BDSM gear and calling himself, well, look it up but it's pretty hilarious in a dark way. He then uses his family's ill-gotten fortune to enlist a team of really evil henchmen. And there you have it, good versus evil with the perfunctory epic battle at the end.

In my opinion, John Leguizamo was sort of wasted in this film. They killed him off way too soon. But Mother Russia was almost as much fun as Hit Girl to watch and the two doing battle was pretty good but not as much fun as it could have been.

Naturally, you don't want to watch this one with the kids. There's just too much violence and foul language and the humor is entirely adult but it's almost as much fun as the first movie and that makes it worthwhile. After all, the moral of the story is that you must keep your promises but you also have to be true to yourself.

I've been saving this movie for years for some kind of urgent need for a laugh emergency. But, it was on cable last night and since I was worn out and not interested in exerting enough energy to push a button on the remote, I resigned myself to the fact that perhaps I needed it and had saved it long enough. It was so funny I was practically hysterical and had suddenly lost that feeling of being too tired to move.

Anyone who used to watch In Living Color can attest to Jim Carrey being a master of physical comedy. I used to watch him do utterly amazing stuff on that show and looked forward, every week, to seeing what he'd do next. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls is, unquestionably, Jim Carrey at his very best.

That goes for the entire crew of the movie. I think many people tend not to notice but there are huge differences between the quality of a comedy such as When Nature Calls and the rather half-hearted movies that just don't work very well and are not very funny as a result. Some of this can be directly attributed to how well the director frames scenes and how well they maintain the energy. To how well the writers, director of photography and the film editor did their jobs. With When Nature Calls, you have all of these bases covered in spades. It's truly well made in front of, as well as behind, the camera.

Carrey never loses his momentum in this movie. He goes over the top quite frequently. Unlike some other comedic actors, though, he seems to almost always know when to stop. And when to play it cool, although that doesn't happen very often. I don't know how much of the movie is scripted and how much was ad libbed, but whatever the combination, it works beautifully. It's almost always hilarious and the camera always seems to be in just the right place. Exquisite production.

Ace Ventura is a force of nature and all the world's a straight man for him, apparently. No one is safe. He is constantly pulling someone's chain. Particularly the bad guys who he always has squarely in his sights. I would definitely recommend this movie to a family. The small children, particularly the boys, will get a big kick out of it. It's disgusting from time to time and drifts effortlessly in to the scatological here and there but it's all good. One tip: when Ace gets to the African tribe's village, that might be a good time to leave the room for a few minutes. You're welcome.

This movie is hilarious and for many reasons. Not the least of which are the special effects that just cracked me up most of the time. Truly inventive and well done.

For those of us guys who demand eye candy in the movies we watch, there's Jessica Alba looking perfect and feminine, even dainty. There's also Vivica Fox looking tough but beautiful. But the real home run for me was that the director would sometimes inject scenes in to the fray with the thought 'let's see how really disgusting I can make this'. Absolutely fun to watch. Watch it with your girlfriend, she'll be grabbing you often and hiding her eyes while she clings to you when the truly gruesome and disgusting scenes come up.

Sometimes I wonder if Bill Murray and Dan Akyroyd are lucky or good. If they were good, they probably would have refused to make this steaming pile of slime. If they were lucky, well, their luck ran out this time. Ghostbusters 2 is thoroughly uninspired, pointless, full of plot holes and is a mere semblance of the original's fine craftsmanship.

The movie makes no sense. For starters, as with a lot of sequels, it starts out with people who were living happily ever after at the end of the first movie. If they were still living happily ever after, there'd be no point to this crappy follow-up, so of course somewhere since the end of the first movie, stuff happened and no one's happy any longer, including the audience.

And, as with many sequels, they decided to take some elements of the first movie and have the audience choke down a ton more of it. Somehow, they got the idea that slime was really funny in Ghostbusters so let's make the slime a star and parade it endlessly across the screen.

The premise seems to be that there's a river of negative emotion, in the form of slime, under NYC that runs towards, for no particular reason, and terminates at a museum with a really big painting of a sixteenth century whack job. So, we have the slime and we have the bad guy and they seem to be related. There's slime, and there's a bad guy... and there's slime… and a bad guy. I give up. Now, the bad guy, rather than come back to life as a full grown evil overlord who will rule the world, decides that he should grab some baby from someone (conveniently, Dana just happens to have one) and manifest his evil presence inside it and in seventeen or eighteen years, he'll be ready to rule the world when he gets out of high school. I smell an Oscar. Heh Heh.

The movie starts out with bold letters telling us: Five Years Later. Uh huh. Five years after, I guess, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man victory that, apparently, turned out to be a flurry of lawsuits and career ending bad vibes when the city woke up the morning after and realized it hadn't gone to bed with Mr. Right. Oh well, I guess when we saw all of the cheering New Yorkers admiring the ghostbusters in the first movie, we were MISTAKEN!

Dana and Bill's character (that's right, I don't even CARE what his character's name is anymore) didn't get married because Bill has problems with the whole commitment thing. Then, Dana married some other guy who we never see and know nothing about who impregnated her about a year before this sorry excuse for a movie begins and then he moved to London. I guess he had commitment problems too. At least the baby didn't pop out of her chest but I digress. The rest of the movie is more like a series of SNL skits that have little to do with each other. A lot of the actors who graced the first movie showed up for this one. The mayor, the accountant, the secretary who just magically shows up and becomes one again once the slime patrol regains its credibility, the slime guy who slimed Bill Murray in the first movie.

The movie is absolutely full of plot holes and stuff that happens for no particular reason. Rick Moranis was an accountant but now he's an attorney who has no courtroom experience. Later, he somehow hooks up with Annie Potts (the secretary) who is interested in him for no apparent reason and they get down in Dana's apartment. It gets worse. At what passes for the movie's finale, he has his own ghostbuster uniform and his own proton pack. Annie packs him off to wander the streets looking for a ride to the museum and finds the slimer is driving the bus. OK, where's the exit?

The original ghostbusters, in the meantime, have commandeered the Statue of Liberty and animated her so that she trudges off to the museum too, with the busters riding in her head. OK, so the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man couldn't do this movie because he had a previous engagement, right? I mean, if they're going to create one ridiculous, nonsensical plot hole after another, surely they could have glued Stay Puft back together, yeah? What other giant thing can we have walking down a busy NYC street smashing police cars inadvertently? Never mind that she's metal and could only manage to waddle incoherently towards the target. We animated her so now she's not metal. Fine, whatever. These two train wrecks converge on the museum. Liberty smashes the sky light. Oh goody, another lawsuit for Ghostbusters 3 if they can talk the studio in to financing it. The overlord shows up, makes some faces. The slime shows up and, well, slimes some faces. In a final bit of stupidity, Rick Moranis's character stands outside with a crowd that has appeared out of nowhere to sing Auld Lang Syne. In an amazing bit of timing, since he's in no way in communication with the actual ghostbusters, Rick shoots off his proton gun at the same time the other ghostbusters do and saves the day, er, night, er whatever. Happy New Year, New York, New York.

At this point, I'm having an out of body experience as this horrifyingly bad movie has sucked the will to live out of me. Oh my god, Bill. I've got news for you, dude, Garfield wasn't your biggest mistake after all! Perhaps drinking heavily before and during the movie would have helped. Anyway, the baby is safe, Dana is in love with Bill Murray's character again and the whole motley crew oozes it's way in to the sunset, er, moonset, whatever, to continue their happily-ever-after-or-not lives. Who ya gonna call? Not Ghostbusters 3.

There are some movies that just shouldn't have been remade. 2011's The Thing, for one, which was actually a remake of a remake. But Total Recall is clearly a huge improvement over the 1990 movie of the same name, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronny Cox.

Now, don't get me wrong, I actually liked Arnold's movie. Ronny Cox, as Cohaagen really stole the show and was far and away the real star of the movie. Michael Ironside and Sharon Stone put in very dependable performances. Arnold was entertaining, certainly, I don't dislike him. Overall, it's a movie that I don't mind seeing again, and I will.

Taking in to account that the special effects of the remake are, of course, much better than the original. And, aside from the fact that the 2012 remake cost twice as much as it made (so far) while the original made twice as much as it cost (to date) and the ending of the 2012 movie was a bit lame, it's still a better movie than the 1990 original.

In the first place, Colin Farrell is an actual actor, unlike Arnold who is a movie star who became one Ala Johnny Weissmueller. It's great to see someone playing Douglas Quaid who can make the character believable and can actually act without looking like a cartoon character.

Secondly, the remake also stars Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel, who are unquestionably, two of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen. They are also both excellent actors who I never get tired of watching (and not just for their beauty either, that would get boring very fast if that was all they had).

The remake cleaned up and improved upon some of the, shall we say, less efficient aspects of the original. For example, they combined the woman who pretends to be Quaid's wife with Cohaagen's lieutenant (played by Sharon Stone and Michael Ironside) and the result was Kate Beckinsale's riveting bad girl.

Another change that the remake did was rather elegant. In the original, Quaid starts out as a really bad guy. He's so bad that he's second only to the king of bad, Cohaagan. So, Arnold, you're a really bad guy who goes undercover to be a good guy. When they erased your memory, they also erased your badness? Are morals, or in your case, a lack of morals erased too? And when you're let in on the fact that you're really a bad guy, what makes you decide to be good? Arnold's Quaid almost makes the transition for no particular reason. Maybe it's hanging out with mutants, whatever.

But, in the remake, Quaid fell in love with a woman who changed his mind and he became good over time. This was an improvement, certainly, not only of the script but the acting as well.

Also, they did away with Mars and instead kept everything on an Earth that had seen better days. In place of the red planet is The Fall which is a HUGE elevator-type contraption that travels through the earth and connects the United Federation of Britain with The Colony (the last two habitable places left on earth). Really stunning effects make it almost an uncredited star of the movie.

The synthetic police officers were a nice touch and very slick.

But wait, there's more. The remake sprinkles homages to the original throughout the movie (three-breasted woman, the checkpoint that Quaid attempts to slip though, that Quaid says he always wanted to go to Mars, et al).

Perhaps surprisingly, there are some aspects of the remake that just aren't up to the standards of the original (gasp!). The one that stands out the most is that Ronny Cox's Cohaagen was a spectacular testament to the actor's abilities. He was the best part of the original. In the remake, Bryan Cranston's Cohaagen is rather two-dimensional and bland; a cookie cutter head cheese bad guy.

Another bit of atrociousness is that Bill Nighy's appearance is almost a cameo. This is another actor who I just love to watch and can really carry any scene he's in. But in this movie, he's gone before he even gets a chance to warm up much. A real waste. Perhaps there's more to these characters and their obscure connection that is sitting on the cutting room floor. I'll have to check that out on the super deluxe blue ray edition that's bound to come out in the near future.

One thing that was annoying, and this is nitpicking, is that couldn't we just once see Jessica or Kate in a bikini? Come on now. As it is, all we see of them in this movie is what you'd probably see anywhere in public.

Overall, if you loved the original, unless Arnold is a god that you worship, you'll love this remake. Definitely worth the price and worth a look.

Regardless how flawed the world may see Mel Gibson as, he's a first rate filmmaker. If you haven't seen this movie yet, make sure you are prepared to sit at watch it for a couple of hours because it is so riveting that you don't want to get up even with a pause button.

Like Barbara Tuckman's book "A Distant Mirror", Apocalypto reflects the parallels between modern civilization and one in decline in the distant past. Where as Tuckman shows us the similarities between our modern era and 12th century Europe, Gibson gives us a stunning view of a superpower slowly destroying itself from within while neatly allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks, as it were, and see our own reflection.

Apocalypto is considered rather violent by our present-day pacified society but it's not gratuitous violence; rather, it depicts a society and a time at least a thousand years ago that had no delusions or affectations of being non-savage as ours does today. You may not want the kids to see this one. At least, not with you and not for a few years.

That said, the hero is a member of a tribe that is far enough from the Mayan civilization not to be influenced by them but close enough for its warriors to come along and capture them and either sell them or use them as human sacrifices in their rituals.

Historically, we don't really know why the Mayan civilization collapsed. As the film's opening William Durant quote "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." suggests, it may simply have exploited its natural resources to exhaustion and destroyed itself or endured an extended period of drought. Again, we don't really know. Even those modern-day ancestors of the Mayans have no way of knowing for sure.

It is also largely regarded as fact that the Mayans practiced human sacrifice as part of their worship of the heavens. It was a very advanced society for its time; it had a written language, studied mathematics and astronomy, for example, and despite how barbaric we see them as today, they had a lot going for them as far as civilizations go.

The film starts as the Mayans are somewhere in decline (presumably sometime during the 8th or 9th century) and just before the Spanish Conquistadors arrived at southern Mexico. That, of course, is theatrical license, it's not established fact that Spain's forces arrived at that moment in time but it gives Jaguar Paw a way to finally escape capture by the remains of the warrior band who pursued him.