Every once in awhile someone gets what they think is a great idea which usually isn't the beacon of greatness they think it should be. With Julie and Julia someone came up with the idea of taking two books, Julie and Julia and Julia Child's autobiography, and make a sort of hybrid film out of the two. What you get is a film where half of it is very good and the other half is blah, dragging the whole movie down the drain.
Since this review almost reads like the typical good news and bad news cliche, I'll start with the bad news. Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is sick of her life and apparently needs a task, so she decides to cook her way through the Julia Child cookbook and blogging about it. So what we get is to watch someone who actually made money and a career from writing a quirky blog, whereas the other billion schmucks out there ripping on chick flicks and pre-teen pop culture (ahem) are broke. That's that side of the film. Dull, sad, and tedious.
Now for the good news. The scenes that flashback to Julia Child's introduction to cooking are great. Meryl Streep pulls off the hyperactive Child while Stanley Tucci is much more interesting than Julie Powell's narcoleptic husband. These sequences of the film are great and were very enjoyable to watch, which leads to the problem with this film. By the midway point you really don't give a rat's ass about Julie Powell's blog or any of that crap. Whenever we cut to her cooking and pissing and moaning, you're wanting more Streep as Julia. That fact is the huge crack in this film.
The sad part is I have no idea why they did it this way. Obviously Julie Powell got some kind of big movie check for her blog this is the result. What could have been a great bio-pic about Julia Child dorwns in the whole blog story. It would have been preferable to bookend Julia's story with Powell's, instead of interweaving them together because the only link between the two is on the surface. If there was some link (or the pair of title characters actually meeting each other at some point) the film would have worked better. Instead of a very good film starring Streep and Tucci we get a to and fro mess.
Heartbeeps is the story of two robots (Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters) that meet in a factory, fall in love, and build a baby. Oh, and they're being chased by a poor man's Robocop. Now you can guess how great a movie it is by this point. Many of you have probably never heard of this one, even if it does have the legendary Dick Miller in a cameo as a security guard or an early appearance by serial hotel stiffer Randy Quaid.
Now for the skivvy. This movie sucks. And I don't mean boring, horrible acting, dialogue, and all that stuff. I mean that it sucks like getting in a nail gun accident or being Tiger Woods. The only good thing about this movie is its running time (79 minutes) meaning that you only cringe for a little over an hour. The wonderful dialogue about circuits and power packs will bore you to tears and a plot where they take a walk through the woods then walk back is as eventful as waiting in line for the portapotty at a music festival, which also has one other thing in common in that they are both full of shit. This movie should be avoided at all costs. If you see it in a video store it must be destroyed. Fire works best, although I have seen garbage disposals work just as well.
Quentin Tarantino's second volume to his epic Kill Bill saga follows a more cerebral story than the first film. The action is scaled back to make room for a movie that Sergio Leone would love. It's a film filled with close ups, deranged dialogue, and a great sense of itself. It's hard to believe that at one time both these films were going to be one long movie. Volume 2 is so much different than it's predecessor that you have to wonder if both films as a whole would have been as great as they were separate.
After killing half of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, The Bride (Uma Thurman) prepares to murder and maim through the rest of her former co-workers and finally face the man that put a cap in her crown, Bill (David Carradine). That's the basic storyline- it's still a revenge tale that sweeps us across the country on a mission from hell. Whereas Volume One owes its soul to kung fu movies, Volume Two was born at the breast of the spaghetti western, where there were no consequences, just vast verandas to be filled with the carnage of the day. Tarantino knows the art of Leone and paints the first half of the film with images that Sergio and John Ford would be proud off. The desert is a dark and sinister place at night. Add to it the recklessness of Bill's brother Budd (Michael Madsen) and The Bride's arch nemesis Elle (Daryl Hannah) and you get what amounts to a Mexican stand off in the desert. No one trusts each other and they shouldn't- they're killers.
Once again Tarantino proves that he is a great artist who uses dialogue as his medium, particularly during the confrontation where Bill compares the Bride to Superman. No matter how much she tries to disguise herself as the pregnant wife of a record store owner she will always be a killer- she'll always be Bill's killer. It's dialogue like this that makes a scene that is typical Hollywood fluff and makes it cool. That's the thing about Tarantino- he makes well worn cliches cool.
Of course, the $64,000 question is which volume is better. It's really all a matter of preference. If you grew up with kung fu movies and their ilk you will enjoy the first volume. If spaghetti westerns are your game then you will prefer volume 2. I prefer the second volume, mainly because it slows itself down almost to a crawl, but you don't notice it. It's more cerebral than the constant hack and slash of the first movie and delivers an ending that may seem "wimperish", but is more grandiose than most. Kill Bill, Volume 2 is a great and enjoyable ride.
Starring Bill Goldberg. That says it all. That tells you how utterly shitty this film is and the pain it is to watch it. Goldberg's a killer Santa. I'm not even going to go even deeper into it beyond that fact. This guy was a failure as a wrestler, so you know an Oscar isn't in his future. This film is 78 minutes long (thank god) and you have to wonder which Arab prince threw money away on such a piece of garbage. It was nice to see The Nanny getting her head burned off, but why James Caan, why?
Yes, this is the kind of movie that you scrape off your shoe after stepping on it in the front lawn. It belongs in a poopy bag at the park to be thrown away shortly after falling out of a dogs ass.
I must admit before I get started- I wasn't the biggest fan of Inglourious Basterds the first time I saw it. It was still a very good movie, but I felt that some of the dialogue went much too long even for a Tarantino movie. I was disappointed as hell. So I revisited the movie a few days later and found that on a second viewing the dialogue flows a lot better than in my original viewing. So let this be a lesson to you- watch it twice, especially if war films are not your forte.
Inglourious Basterds is a World War II saga about a group of Jewish Allied Soldiers that act as an assassination squad, killing and scalping every German they come in contact with, owing Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) one hundred Nazi scalps. The film centers on their exploits to eliminate the entire German high command and end the war once and for all.
Now before you go into this film thinking it's Saving Private Ryan or The Longest Day, please remember that this isn't an action filled movie. There's a ton of dialogue that makes this film more of an espionage flick than an action one. But Tarantino is so good at crafting this film that you don't notice as the Basterds develop a plan for the ultimate execution.
The film owes a lot to the classic World War II films that preceded it, mainly the Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, Where Eagles Dare, and the original Inglorious Bastards. These films take the stance of a group of outcasts leading the way to winning the war against unthinkable odds. Tarantino draws on the basic storyline of these films and updates them in his own unique way of telling a story. Just as he did with the Kill Bill films, he merges several genres and eras of film making into one movie and it works yet again.
Quentin Tarrantino is the world's biggest film student. He's absorbed every film he's ever seen and uses them whenever he writes or directs a film, giving us a history lesson in the cinema of the 1960's and '70's. Just as with his other films, Inglourious Basterds is another unique film that doesn't redefine a genre because it doesn't belong to any one genre. With Tarantino, every film is a unique experience that you're not going to get anywhere else.
So what do we call Terminator Salvation? A sequel? A prequel? It's hard to define and even harder to explain the in's and out's of the Terminator franchise to an someone coming into it cold. What this film does is follow the war between the machines and the Resistance, a small group of survivors trying to destroy that evil programming called Skynet. (insert Vista joke here)
The film basically follows the exploits of John Connor (Christian Bale), who is considered a prophet by the Resistance because he can see the future. No, actually he has the tapes his mother started recording in the first film. It does beg the question- How did he find a functioning tape deck in the post-Apocalyptic world? Why couldn't he put them on his iPod? There's plenty of room between the Guns N' Roses tunes.
John Connor isn't the main character in this fourth installment. Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) awakens from a coma during one of the battles and enters this new world that he doesn't know. He literally stumbles into Connor and Connor's father (who is only a teenager at this point) Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin). Remember that Reese copulates way back in 1984.
This is basically a futuristic war film with effects that mesmerize beyond belief. Sadly, there isn't much of a story to go along with it. That's the problem with the film- if you haven't followed the original films you will be confused, wondering what the hell is going on as the film plays out. Worthington is the highlight of the film, playing a man lost in the brave new world to which he has awaken. Bale seems underused in the film and has adopted his gruff Batman voice that people freaked about last summer for this film as well.
This film seems to be opening another trilogy of Terminator films and even though it outshines the third film, Terminator Salvation fails to achieve the greatness of James Cameron's original films. This film is full of great action, but fails to deliver much of a story behind it. Not the best of the franchise, but it still delivers a nice ride.
The Shootist represents John Wayne's swan song, the final film where the legend that is John Wayne appeared on the screen. The film follows the final days of J.B. Books (Wayne). Dying of cancer, he visits an old doctor friend (Jimmy Stewart) who informs the old gunslinger that he doesn't have much time left. Books takes up lodgings with a Mrs. Rogers (Lauren Bacall) and her son Gillom (Ron Howard). When the area finds out that Books is in town and dying it seems that everyone wants a piece of him, coming out of the woodwork with money making schemes as this shootist prepares for one final battle.Directed by Don Siegel (Dirty Harry) The Shootist is Wayne's best acting since The Searchers almost twenty years earlier. Instead of the invincible cowboy he plays a man at the end, preparing for what may lay beyond this world. The legend is still there, but he's a little humbler. Just looking at the rest of the cast, you know the films going to be good, though it does suffer from an almost Made For TV feel. John Wayne survived almost three years beyond the release of The Shootist. He never made another film. Having this film as a bookend to a career that was simply legendary was a great capstone. He was THE premiere MAN for over thirty years and brought his persona to his films in a way that has never been repeated except by Clint Eastwood. John Wayne was a man and a character that grew beyond the confines of the silver screen and into American culture.
Every once in awhile someone gets what they think is a great idea which usually isn't the beacon of greatness they think it should be. With Julie and Julia someone came up with the idea of taking two books, Julie and Julia and Julia Child's autobiography, and make a sort of hybrid film out of the two. What you get is a film where half of it is very good and the other half is blah, dragging the whole movie down the drain.
