Scotty: Yay!
We used to go see all our movies on Wednesday but now that she’s all employed and no one seems to have movie showings in the 8 o’clock hour, we’ve gotten a bit behind.
Boo!
But now we’ve settled on a new day, Friday so we can be extra timely.
*applause*
But that also leaves us going into this week behind on some movies we wanted to see so, tada! It’s movie blitz time. Three movies, one week, and one super review.
Movie #1 - The Green Lantern: Hal Jordon Learns the Power of Talking about his Feelings
This movie stars Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordon, a reckless test pilot who is granted a power ring that can project his “will” as anything he can think of, as long as it’s green.
The kind of omnipotent power you’d expect from the company that brought us Superman.
It also gives him the ability to fly and make instant green clothes. Unfortunately this green ring means that he is now part of group alien space cops charged with protecting the universe from evil, and the color yellow.
The two are related.
Mainly, yellow represents fear (Maybe because it’s the color your underwear turns when you wet yourself.) There’s a giant physical embodiment of fear/yellow that is consuming planets.
It’s basically a tentacled Galactus except actually threatening.
The problem, Hal is a giant commitment-phobe. Add in a creepy guy with a bulbous head (That reminds me of several boys I knew in high-school) and you get a superhero movie!
And Good Lord was it boring!
In parts.
A lot of parts.
But not all parts.
Seriously movie, alien space cops. How do you make alien space cops boring! The plot was pretty basic, but unlike Thor which had a similarly basic plot, there was just no life to Green Lantern, no spark. I mean, a girl can only oggle at Ryan Reynolds for so long.
But you can oogle at Chris Hemsworth forever...
That’s because he was in a better movie. And here’s the most annoying part of Green Lantern, deep down, it’s not bad. You can tell that a couple drafts ago, this was a genuinely fun movie. I like the character interactions, I like the actors, I liked the Green Lantern Corps and the main villain Parallax (the Galactus guy) even if his name does sound like an anti-depressant. The pacing and flow of this movie was just so BAD. The movie is only about an hour and forty-five minutes, it felt like two and a half hours.
They exposited about the Green Lantern Corp twice at the beginning and during the requisite training scene. There was no new information the second time, I guess they just thought we forgot.
They also had an obligatory parental death scene that was just way too cheesy. There was also a scene with Hal Jordan and his nephew that was cute and gave great character development but was just totally unnecessary plot wise. After that scene at the beginning, that kid was never mentioned or seen again.
I will give Green Lantern credit for the best line I’ve ever heard in a comic book movie...
I’m gonna cut you off to prevent spoilers. That line was too awesome to ruin.
Awww.
There are parts about this movie that I really did like. The standard female love interest was probably the most likable “comic book love interest” I have watched. And their romance was totally believable because they had “a history.” It’s not like they fell in love in three days like some other movies I’ve seen.
Starring Natalie Portman.
Other than that, the special effects were decent and the general mythos was really cool. It churned my imagination, which I find as a good mark of a watchable film.
It made me want to read the comics more than watch it.
It was bad. I knew it was a bad movie while watching it. I still liked it for some reason.
Ryan Reynolds in a speedo being examined by aliens. There’s your reason.
Super 8: Cloverfield and E.T. Make a Baby
Oh my God I love this movie. I think out of every movie we’ve seen so far this summer, this has been the only one I will put on my Christmas list.
It was very good and it would have stirred in me feeling of nostalgia if it weren’t for the fact that I have no memory of the 70’s or 80’s. Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters and Indiana Jones were “old-timey” movies for us.
We were like three. So we weren’t exactly the target audience for the giant Spielberg nostalgia-love fest that is Super 8.
Two for me, you old fogey. I feel like we should be filled with childhood whimsy when thinking of Steven Spielberg. However, the four biggest movies Spielberg directed when we were kids consisted of Jurassic Park, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List.
None of these movies we were allowed to see in theaters.
And one of which still gives me nightmare. (Here’s a hint: it involved Velociraptors.)
Also, you forgot Hook which I actually remember going to see but not anything of the movie itself.
Let’s move away from that haunting image....
Right, so if we don’t have an ample amount of Spielberg-nostalgia, then why did we like the movie so much?
It’s just so atmospheric. It pulls you in and just lets you steep in the world they’ve created that’s still totally relatable even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Super 8 camera in person. On top of all that, there’re really cool explosives.
Scotty’s watching the trailer for Sherlock Holmes, so I guess I need to copy the summary from Wikipedia. Super 8 centers around a group of friends who are filming their own Super 8 movie when a train derails. Engines, microwaves, and people begin to disappear and the army shows up and is being terribly mysterious in a Roswell kind of way. As the only witnesses to the accident, the kids of course have to investigate these new events all while trying to finish their movie.
The kids were funny and cute, and not really annoy like child characters tend to be. I also liked the lack of (Or so good I didn’t notice) CGI.
The kids acted like real kids. During the movie’s climax, one of them even decided not to go. He was like “fuck that shit, I’m staying here where I’m not going to die,” which I loved.
Kids are awesome, but that train explosion was cooler.
Oh man, that train explosion. But I have more to write about the kids.
Fine, talk about those suckers.
Also, as someone who has tried to make a movie with her friends, I totally related to Charles (Riley Griffiths), the kid director. The whole movie within the movie subplot is really what endeared me to this movie. Trying to coerce all your friends with no acting experience to convey what you believe to be your fantastic vision of a film and having to walk them all through it.
The train explosion had such a great use of pyrotechnics and flying stuff. I’ve become too used green screen scenes, which this might have been, but it definitely didn’t seem like that.
I honestly couldn’t tell what was real exploding train and what was computer exploding train and on that note, the monster or really lack thereof because you don’t really see the bugger until the last thirty minutes.
And, in my opinion, it was a bit of a letdown. Maybe because it was obviously CG or maybe because nothing was exploding.
They were totally going for a Jaws thing where we would only get a glimpse or blurry look at the monster before its big reveal. But just like Jaws, the monster is never as cool as what you’re imagining it is.
I think I would have liked it better if it was animatronic, like Jaws.
A walking animatronic shark....?
YES
Bad Teacher: More Like Bad Movie, Am I Right?
Actually, it wasn’t that bad. Wasn’t that good, but not bad. Unremarkable.
Jason Segel as the gym teacher was funny, Cameron Diaz was funny but they didn’t have much to work with as far as the script was concerned. Also, so not worthy of the R.
The movie was not as crude as I was expecting. Also, Justin Timberlake.
It was like he was in an extended SNL sketch and he sure is wacky!
In case you care, it’s about a teacher who’s more interested in finding a rich husband than shaping the youth of America. Stuff happens and we’re all better people at the end of it. This movie definitely had the potential to be a good, edgy black comedy but the creative team that brought us Year One was just not up the job.
Eh, I don’t want to waste anymore time on this film.
Transformers
Lots of explosions and a pretty sexist stereotypical girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley).
Mind you, talking about Transformers is like grading on a curve. The big booms were pretty, the “story” was stupid and the movie opened with a shot of the new girl’s ass. However, I didn’t hate her nearly as much as Scotty did. She was actually relatively likable and while she did spend the movie running around in heels and not getting nearly as dirty as anyone else in that movie, you can’t really blame her for that.
Not just heels, jeggings. And when she wasn’t wearing notpants, she was wearing mini dresses. But it’s not just that, it was that she was a replacement with very little back story. But that doesn’t matter in the Transformers universe, because no one cares about women.
I say, for what she had to work with, she made a likeable character. I also remember there being racist robots...again...but don’t remember exactly what they were and that’s basically what Transformers is, a big dumb movie that’s fun to watch.
I will have nightmares about those jeggings for the rest of my life.
So, are we all caught up now?
Nope we still need to write about Harry Potter and Captain America, not to mention go see Cowboys and Aliens.
Crap...
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