Brothers

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Plot: Sam Cahill, a soldier (Toby Maguire) is captured in Afghanistan and is presumed dead. Grace, his wife (Natalie Portman) and brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) get together while he is gone and after he is rescued there is an awkward love triangle. Sam was tortured and has post-tramatic stress, so he is emotionally distant and violent.

Review: Brothers is a thin, manipulative melodrama with little meaning beyond its calculated emotional trap. The first hour of the move marches through the story line slowly and mechanically to get the love-triangle set-up. The entire Afghanistan story line is boring and empty with no insight into the prisoner experience nor the reason for the war -- simply a footnote When Sam is released, there is barely any interest in Sam's interior life, just the love story. Similarly loser Brother Tommy suddenly becomes a noble citizen to sharpen up his appeal to Grace.

Natalie Portman's Grace is the only bright spot in this dreary film. There is a wonderful moment when Grace hears that Sam is still alive on the phone. We see realistic facial expressions of disbelief, happiness and fear -- top notch. She had two or three of these brief moments of outstanding facial acting, for example when she kissed Tommy for the first time. Portman shows she is a skilled actress, and I'd like to see her in a better movie.

Cast:Natalie Portman, Toby Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal

Crew: directed by Jim Sheridan; based on the movie "Brødre" written by Bier and Jensen

Rating: 1 flask: Portman is good enough to make this 1.5 stars, but I hated being at this movie so much, it has to be 1.0


More: I wanted to leave during the middle.


Even more: The most over-rated movie of the year.

Yet more: At the end, the audience jumped up quickly and headed out of the theater like they could not wait to leave.
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Avatar

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Plot: Humans come to the planet Pandora for a rare mineral, and need to displace the native forest people, the Na'vi. Grace (Sigorney Weaver) genetically engineers native bodies that humans can animate like The Matrix or maybe a predator drone. A paraplegic, Jake Sculley (Sam Worthington), becomes a native, and is accepted by the natives and falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saltana) a pretty native princess. Initially Jake feeds intelligence to the humans, but later his loyalty becomes divided. 

Review: Great movie entertainment that is simply spectacular with action, emotion, and movie-house morality. I really liked the realistic way the animated Na'vi moved so gracefully though the trees, and later through the air. The movie characters were evocative and emotional -- unlike most motion capture characters, and even better than Lord of the Ring's Gollum -- far better than Disney's A Christmas Carol.

A fast moving story rapidly sets up the conflict between the humans and the Na'vi. Jake and the audience spends a long time with the Na'vi, and the wonderful visual world they inhabit. The audience is won over by the time the bulldozers arrive.

Although the story is predictable, that is because it is archetypal. The story is like the European migration into North America and the displacement of the native Americans. Visually it is more like Europeans coming to tropical Africa -- perhaps like displacement of natives in Nigeria for petroleum. There is the more elemental conflict between the spiritual, grounded and connected natives with the mechanized and money-grubbing humans.

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saltana, Sigorney Weaver, Steven Lang

Crew: written and directed by James Cameron

Rating: 4.0 flasks


More: I want to see it again.

Even More: I liked the animated Sigorney.
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The Veridian Dynamics Coffee Cup

To celebrate the return of Better Off Ted, the great sitcom on ABC, I want to show off my Veridian Dynamics Coffee cup.

For more on Veridian Dynamics, see my first two posts. 

I decided that I needed a Veridian Dynamics coffee cup, and after searching the ABC fan store, and poking around on eBay, where I found nothing. I ended up at Zazzle. Zazzle is a very cool site where you can make shirts, hats and coffee cups with your own graphics.

There is this technicality that the Veridian Dynamics logo isn't really my graphics, but well, anyway. I made a coffee cup, actually two, and it turned out OK. [A defect is the blue line under the logo, which is actually in the image file. I should have photoshopped that out.]

At Zazzle you can put your items for sale, and collect a little royalty. I tried that, but savvy Disney attorney's made Zazzle take the item off for copyright violations.

Blind Side

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Plot: A white housewife takes in a black boy who later becomes a high school athlete. The boy becomes a member of the family gradually during the movie. At the end, there is controversy involving college recruiting. 

Review: Blind Side is cloying sweet candy soaked in warm-fuzzy melodrama, frosted with after-school-special morality and all dipped in suburban white guilt. No character was realistic; Leigh Ann Touhy (Sandra Bullock) is too perfect and too glib; husband Sean Touhy (Tim McGraw) and daughter Collins Touhy (Lily Collins) are just props for Leigh. The football player, Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron,) tries so heard to prove he is harmless and nice, that he does not have any human emotion.

Jae Head who played the young son, SJ Touhy, steals every scene he is in. He lightens up the action, and is used by the director to move the story along. I doubt there is any documentary accuracy in any of his dialog. Lots of good lines, well delivered. I'd like to see more of Jae Head.

Sandra Bullock also delivers a fun performance in an otherwise dismally cheerful picture.

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Quinton Aaron, Jae Head

Crew: written and directed by John Lee Hancock based on the book by Michael Lewis

Rating: 1.5 flasks - not bad enough to be one star, but really awful. I was going to put up a picture of treacle syrup instead of the movie poster to show what I really thought.


More: I liked the football game scenes. Good photography. Good plotting for these quick scenes.

Even more: Blind Side deals with racial issues. The film is hard on the southern whites who do not accept Michael, but the film does not present positive black role models (aside from the NCAA official at the very end of the film -- who is a 'villain'.) All the younger blacks in this film are hoodlums and drug addicts and all the virtuous adults were white.
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Fantastic Mr Fox

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Plot: Mr Fox steals poultry, and despite his wife's nagging him to quit, he begins a private war on three neighboring farmers. The farmer's retaliate and go after the Mr Fox's family and the other woodland creatures with heavy equipment. Mr Fox makes a plan, gathers a team, and everything turns out fine. 

Review: Fantastic Mr Fox is a high concept comedy that happens to be done in stop-action animation, and for some reason this heightens the novelty and irony. Mr Fox is like George Clooney in Oceans 11/12 making plans, recruiting people and stealing things.

The film is voiced by celebrity actors including George Clooney as Mr. Fox. The animation is servicable, but not really up to the task of communicating the characters motivations and thoughts. We are often viewing doll-heads mouthing lines.

The real star is Wes Anderson who delivers his brand of satire on American society using animals. Anderson who did The Royal Tannenbaums, and The Life Aquatic, enjoys exploring quirky characters and drawing out their likeability. This is a good installment in that series.

The film gets lots of points for being creative and different. It is also fun-to-watch and keeps moving. On the other hand, there is no social message or insights into the psyche here. Mr Fox steals farm goods because "he is a wild animal," and we get no clues into how people should live our lives in a society. I don't think there is a "moral," in this film - just a wry ironic grin.

Crew: directed by Wes Anderson; based on the book by Roald Dahl

Rating: 3.0 flasks: Pluses - creative, fun; Minuses - not a lot of content or drama



More: I loved the side-scrolling video-game-like sequences.

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Disney's A Christmas Carol

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Plot: A straight-forward adaptation of Dicken's book. You know the story . . .

Review: The movie done in CGI 3D animation, and the 3D effect is the best I have seen. It actually enhanced the viewing experience -- not just a novelty. The CGI characters were unevenly rendered.  Scrooge was well done in CGI and seemed to show emotions -- as good as any CGI movie character.  Conversely, the minor characters were not good. Zemeckis was unwilling or unable to make these characters interesting and realistic. They seemed deliberately fuzzy and wooden  -- maybe to save money. Distractingly poor.

There are some great adaptations of this great story, and Disney's does not measure up. The beginning is good, but the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Future miss the mark. The movie is not scary enough and the happy ending is not happy enough. The movie lacks soul and the poor rendering of the minor characters only made that worse.

Voice Actor: Jim Carrey

Crew: Directed by Robert Zemeckis; based on the classic book by Charles Dickens

Rating: 2.0 flasks


More: People who have not read the book are missing something. You should read it -- it's short.

Even More: The title should not be Disney's A Christmas Carol; it is Dicken's A Christmas Carol.
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2012

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Plot: As predicted by the Mayans, the world actually ends in 2012, and geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) warns the world's governments, who make plans to save the world -- or at least as much of it as they can. Meantime moonlighting author Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) is tipped off to the disaster, and tries to save his wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and kids Lilly and Noah. They narrowly manage to escape disaster after disaster as they make their way to a secret destination and their destiny.

Review: This is a big, mindless, sloppy action movie suitable for a big bucket of popcorn and not very much internal reflection. The initial set-up of the disaster is okay for science fiction, but each mini-disaster is melodramatic, just-in-time, made-for-video and spectacular -- never any subtlety. People who demand common sense should stay home, or leave their brain in the lobby.

I began to view it as a serious of grand disaster scenes, and on that level it works well. The actors pull of some good lines, and the situations are always death-defying & dramatic. I was often so engaged in the movie, I could barely stand the suspense.

The video is always spectacular, although just too reliably of major landmarks and always right next to our heros. Some of the disaster scenes are outstanding.

Although the movie is long, it does not seem that way. It was a crowd-pleaser. The gang at my theater clapped at the end.

Nonetheless, it is not a great movie since it could have been so much better with a few re-writes. It could not have been more melodramatic.

Cast: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet

Written and directed by:  Roland Emmerich, who made the similar film Independence Day and other mindless entertainment.

Rating: 2.0 flasks; A 1.5 star movie with an extra half because it was fun-to-watch.


More: The least subtle movie I have ever seen.

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