Movie Reviews for people with small kids: Date Night edition

So the wife and I got a babysitter Saturday night and headed out to wreck the town, which for me mostly consists of going out to dinner and seeing a movie that isn’t a year old.

So we went to see what everyone else saw this weekend: Oz the Great and Powerful.

Part of the challenge of doing a prequel is that you know exactly where the characters are supposed to end up at the end of the movie. A good director will side-step this problem by making the journey and the characters interesting enough that you want to see how the characters ended up there. And other directors will give you spunky kid Darth Vader woo-hooing and awkward ‘romance’ scenes that must have been written by a celibate monk who has not actually seen a human woman or any interaction between the sexes.

Anyway, Oz rests on the titular character and as long as you go into it with that in mind, it is an enjoyable film about a man caught up in extraordinary circumstances who lies, bluffs, and fakes his way through it until he becomes the man he was pretending to be. James Franco’s performance is great as the insufferable, sleazy carnival magician conman who cons his way into becoming a hero and figure the people of Oz believe in, and he is largely responsible for carrying the movie.

Franco is a cad, who abuses his assistant (Zach Braff), seduces young women with lies, refuses to settle down with his childhood sweetheart (Michelle Williams) because he doesn’t want to be a good man, he wants to be a great man like Harry Houdini or Thomas Edison. When the husband of one of the objects of his affection wants to beat the tar out of him, he hops a balloon into a tornado which drops him into the land of Oz.

I joked about how this movie could all be the result of a vivid hallucination of a dying man, but I’m not joking when I say that this is a distinct possibility. Oz finds himself in a world where he becomes the most important person in the world. His childhood sweetheart is a powerful good witch. His assistant is his flying monkey butler. And he is able to work a miracle for a little girl in Oz when he couldn’t do the same in Kansas. It’s an interesting thought anyway.

Despite the marketing, the witches are definitely in the background and their stories fall a little flat, especially Mila Kunis’ Theodora who gets seduced by Oz and has her heart broken. Her transformation from innocent girl into a cackling, screaming wicked witch is a bit too fast and a bit too contrived for my liking. Rachel Weiss is definitely in the background, but does a good turn as her own wicked witch who has lied and schemed her way to the top and definitely doesn’t feel like stepping aside for another liar to take her place.

Michelle Williams does a good turn here as Glinda, giving her personality and humanizing her a bit from the sugary sweet version in the Wizard of Oz (who was actually pretty horrible.) She sees through Oz pretty quickly, but is determined to give the people the leader they hope for and can believe in anyway, even if it means going along with a huge con job.

Overall, the journey is a compelling one, the characters are likable, and the resolution is a pretty great.

I would recommend buying tickets for this one.

Movie Reviews for people with small kids: The Dark Knight Rises

This movie came out on DVD on Christmas Eve, so I discovered it last night at the local Redbox kiosk while sent on a mission to get a movie for my wife and myself to turn off our brains, crash on the sofa, and finish off the two cans of Guinness left over from holiday cooking, whilst congratulating ourselves on surviving Christmas and bracing ourselves for the post-Christmas clean up.

Which is to say, we needed a break, and seeing how it’s easier to get a Red Ryder BB Gun from Santa and his elves than it is to find a babysitter, a DVD it would be.

The Dark Knight Rises when you think about the general themes that Christopher Nolan has laid out over the course of the previous movies and continues in this one. That is, that it is possible for one man to do good, that escalation is an inevitable part of fighting evil, and that ideas are even more powerful than men.

Batman, in Batman Begins, was Bruce Wayne’s attempt to create a character larger than himself. He wanted to create an idea of one man using fear and the night to instill terror in criminals who were hiding in plain sight and terrorizing normal people. He wanted to create an avatar of justice to bring out the good men in the Gotham Police Force and inspire the people of the city to take back their town.

In The Dark Knight, this is put to the test by the Joker who appeals through fear and imagery to the darker side of human nature, culminating in a Prisoner’s Dilemma where two boats of people are given detonators to the bombs on the other boat with the promise that both boats would die if they did nothing. Ultimately, the people of Gotham rallied and refused to bow to fear and terror.  Spoilers follow…

Movie Reviews for People with Kids: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Welcome back to our semi-regular feature wherein I continue to review movies that are six months old or more because it’s easier to get a 1,000 monkeys to write MacBeth (even accounting for the flinging of poo) than it is to get a night out to the movies some days.

Today is a very special movie review. It’s a movie that I’ve thought was awesome since the first moment I heard of it. It epitomizes modern American cinema in a way that few others have. After viewing it, there is only one question remaining:

So great movie or greatest movie?

 

Abraham Lincoln takes a look at the complex man that was our 16^th president. A man who started out his life infected with the same sort of white supremacist beliefs that many American men held at the time, who through seeing the evils of slavery and confrontations with radical abolitionists including Fredrick Douglass, gradually evolved from someone who wanted to keep slavery legal to someone who wanted to end it and expatriate black Americans back to Africa to someone who embrace emancipation and accepted equality (as much as anyone in his day did anyway.) A man who skated the edge of constitutionally acceptable behavior (and arguably crossed the line a few times) to try and save the constitution and the Union. And someone looked at him and said, that’s nice and all, but wouldn’t it be more awesome if he were an 80’s action hero who killed people with an axe and he had a black sidekick?

So right away you know you’re in for a good time.

It looks at the institution of slavery from the point of view we might have had if were studying for an American History final at 2am the night before the test and we decided we’d study better if we were baked.

“Like, Dude… so slavery… you’re like living off the work and labor of others. Sort of like a parasite or a vampire. Dude, you’re like a vampire. What if the South was full of vampires and slavery wasn’t about unjustly profiting off of human misery because you’re a greedy, racist bastard, what if the South was eating slaves? Like literally eating slaves…”

Whoa…

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter is pure 100% cheese. It’s what would happen if Lethal Weapon met Buffy the Vampire Slayer at a party, they both got drunk and sired a kid in Wild, Wild West’s bedroom.

For those of you now imagining crazy Mel Gibson making out with Sarah Michelle Gellar, I apologize. For those imagining Joe Pesci making out with Kristie Swanson, seriously, what is wrong with you?

Abe witnesses his mother getting killed by a vampire. Tries to kill that vampire. And a montage later (because what cheesy 80’s style action flick would pass up a chance for a good montage training sequence), he’s out there killing vampires with his silver lined ax while rising through the political establishment to become the President where he kicks off the Civil War to put an end to the Southern Vampires once and for all.

It all culminates in a fight sequence on a locomotive carrying silver to Gettysburg atop a burning bridge that is just glorious in how over the top it is. And that’s not withstanding the logistics of Lincoln getting the results from the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, collecting all of the silver in Washington DC, having it melted down to munitions, packing it all up, and having it shipped to Pennsylvania in time to make a difference when the battle only lasted for three days. What I’m saying is that I think Abe might have called up his good friends Bill and Ted and borrowed their phone booth to set all this up.

Whoa…

Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter is definitely worth a spin if you appreciate over the top bad movies, enjoy a bottle of wine with your movies, or just appreciate good ol’ American cheese. And most of the time, it beats the work of a thousand monkeys, except for that one draft they wrote where MacBeth was a Terminator. That was awesome.

Movie Reviews for People with Kids: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Welcome back to Movie Reviews for People with Small Kids, which is less about finding a suitable family movie than it is about one man’s continuing quest to run what was once a mildly amusing joke about a lack of quality alone time with his wife into the ground so deep that the Morlocks are looking down from a 1,000 feet above him saying, “OOG GOO OOGGHAAAA” which roughly means “Pray thee, noble sir, cease thine vain attempts at jest, come and cast off thine sorrows and sup with us tonight. Reginald has made a delightful casserole out of moss and Eloi.”

Morlockian is a surprisingly “deep” language. Thank you, I’ll be here all week, tip your waiters.

Today, I tackle: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Pirates of the Caribbean: the Curse of the Black Pearl was a good movie. It was fun. It had adventure. Had a bit of romance, albeit a rather boring one. The characters all had clear motivation and the various backstabbings and betrayals all worked within the context of the characters and it all came together to be a surprisingly good movie that no one expected.

Then it made a crapload of money and they spawned out two increasingly bad sequels with a giant CGI monster that they killed off-screen between movies two and three. Seriously.

“A massive fight between an unstoppable sea monster and a naval armada? Pssh, who’d want to see that. This movie needs to be more about the politics of pirates. Also giant ladies made of crabs. Because I have a seafood fetish, alright?”

But Pirates 3 made about a billion dollars world-wide, so a sequel was inevitable. So we got On Stranger Tides. Which also made a billion dollars so, we’ll likely get Pirates 5.

I had zero anticipation for this movie. I didn’t see it in theaters. I didn’t see it on DVD. I only watched it because the Starz channel had a free preview weekend over the long holiday and it was this or Underworld: Awakening which then made the whole thing seem like a “Cake or Death” question, if the cake were fruitcake that was sent to your parents by the crazy aunt in 1975 that somehow ended up in your attic buried behind the Xmas decorations like a long forgotten cursed object in a horror movie. It’s not fresh, it might be a bit moldy, and it sure as hell doesn’t qualify as ‘food’ anymore, if ever, but if the alternative were death, you’d choke down a slice of it and take your chances.

So my hopes weren’t high going into this movie as I started to think of other alternative titles they could have gone with:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Johnny Depp’s European Mansion Payment

Pirates of the Caribbean: the Search for More Money (h/t to Yogurt)

And

“Pirates of the Caribbean: Seriously? We made a fourth one? Who approved this? Was it Johnson? It was Johnson, wasn’t it?”

@#$!%*! Johnson, I hate that guy.

I should probably get into this movie.

Alright, here’s the plot:

A random Spanish ship finds an old man who has been or served on Ponce DeLeon’s ship. Ponce had set out to find the Fountain of Youth, and the old man points the Spanish King in the right direction. Spain dispatches a few ships to go and find it.

Over in England, Jack Sparrow has arrived in London to rescue his former first mate, I don’t know what his character’s name is, so I’ll call him Smee. Sparrow and Smee are quickly recaptured and offered a chance by the British King to go with his old enemy Barbossa (Now without the Black Pearl and without a leg) to find the Fountain before the Spanish do. Although considering how slow news travelled, Spain should have already have a 4-14 day lead on them making a lot of the rest of the movie moot, but whatever… Maybe Q division had spun up a few Ye Ol’ Cellular Shoe Phones for the 1700’s version of 007. Which a 1700’s James Bond film would be a totally better movie than this one.

“Bond, James Bond, and you are? Sacajawea? You’re making this too easy…”

Jack escapes, hooks up with an old girlfriend who is pretending to be him to recruit sailors for her ship which is really her father Blackbeard’s ship who is also going to go find the Fountain of Youth because of a prophesy that a man with one leg will kill him. Which admittedly makes no sense until you find out… well, no, it just makes no sense. Because in order to use the Fountain, you must have two silver chalices, water from the Fountain, the tear of a Mermaid (which doesn’t keep long), and a sacrificial victim whose lifeforce you will steal, keeping you young. Not making you immortal or invulnerable, just young. So Blackbeard could steal the life of his entire crew, rack up a good 3,000 years to spare, and be stabbed to death by the one legged man the following day, thus negating his entire plan, but I digress… No, wait, I don’t. It’s bloody stupid.

There’s also a missionary who falls in love with a mermaid, whose people are really human-eating monsters, which also would have been another better movie. I’m thinking sort of a slow drama/love story where a crew is attacked by mermaids and he is taken captive and spared and he experiences a crisis of faith due to the whole “Holy crap, Mermaids are real? This was not covered in Sunday School!” element, but ultimately decides to spend his days with them and open the Anglican Archdiocese of Atlantis and gets them to stop eating people. At least on Fridays.

Anyway, there’s fighting, explosions, betrayal and all the stuff you’d expect from a Pirates movie. It’s all very rote at this point. The franchise just seems tired now.

The acting is good, though Depp seems to sleepwalk a bit through his Jack Sparrow routine now. It’s just the story, I think makes a critical mistake. Jack Sparrow is not supposed to be THE main character. He is at his best when he’s the crazy force of nature that screws up carefully constructed plans, does unpredictable things, and generally only helps others because it serves his own ends. Building an entire story around him where he is the particular focus and protagonist could probably be done well, but this script doesn’t.

Overall, go back and watch the first film. Catch this one if you can get it for free and don’t have anything more interesting in your watch list.

Movie Reviews for people with small kids: The Raven

It’s a plethora of movie reviews for people with small kids this week, which is less about finding a family friendly movie and more a commentary on how it’s easier to build a  functional nuclear reactor with toothpicks, macaroni, and chewing gum than it is to organize a night out with my beautiful wife.

Toothpicks, macaroni, and chewing gum? Challenge accepted.

Editor’s Note: The aforementioned theoretical construction of a nuclear reactor was intended to be a joke solely for the amusement of readers. Any further inquiries from  homeland security eavsdroppers should be made directly to Angus MacGyver of the Phoenix Foundation.

Moving on, today we’ll look at Raven with John Cusack.

This has as much to do with the Raven as Saw had to do with Black and Decker.

With apologies to Edgar Allen Poe:

Once upon an evening dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many awful videos in the kiosk at the store,
While I cursed, freely swearing, I cast my eyes with great forebearing,
With great forebearing upon a video, a video of Edgar Allen Poe.
“Tis some trick,” I muttered. “One to trick me out of dough.
Only this, and nothing more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in a bleak November,
I saw this tale of people dismembered, the tale I took from the store,
Eagerly I wished the morrow, vainly I sought to borrow
From my vodka surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the poet lost amidst the gore
For the rare poet now cast in a remake of Saw IV,
Nameless here forevermore.

“Picture!” said I, “thing of evil!—picture still, if movie or devil!
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate, yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted–
On this home by horror haunted–tell me truly, I implore:
Is there–is there balm in Gilead?–tell me–tell me I implore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the entertainment center just across my chamber door.

 

Okay, I returned it, and I guess I’m good now. So problem solved. Sorry for the dramatics. I didn’t care for it is what I’m saying.

John Cusack is Edgar Allen Poe, who spends the first 20 minutes playing drunken Poe, which is pretty damn cool. If the movie had been about the last days of drunken Edgar Allen Poe, I think I could have enjoyed it more.

But, this is Hollywood, and in the age in which no historical figure is interesting enough without a secret history full of vampire hunting, witches, goblins, or in this case serial killers, Poe obviously needed some sprucing up Hollywood-style.

History!

So we get a murder mystery retread that is part Saw and  part Sherlock Holmes (the Guy Ritchie one) without the humor.

People are being murdered in ways taken from Poe’s horror tales, so the police take him on as a consultant, and the serial killer goes into creepy stalker mode, demanding Poe write lurid accounts of his exploits or he’ll kill the woman Poe loves.

So we get a rather listless manhunt movie, where it’s fairly easy to figure out the killer if you’re paying attention and recognize the creepy stalker/love vibe that the whole scenario is steeped in.

It’s not as jaw-droppingly awful as Battleship was, so it didn’t inspire nearly the same amount of venom from me, which perhaps is a worse sin for a movie, that of mediocrity so profound that it inspires zero emotions in the watcher.

The good: Drunk Poe. The acting: Cusack does a good job with what he’s given, as does Luke Evans. The masquerade scene is well done, albeit a bit confusing near the end.

The bad: Everything else. A tired, listless plot. A predictable villain. The lack of character study moments.

Overall: If you hear this Raven tapping at your door, throw the deadbolt.

Movie Reviews for People with Small Kids: Battleship

Today is a very special movie review for people with small kids, which as you all know is less about finding a family film to watch and more a testament to my ongoing flogging of a dead horse about how it’s easier to invade Russia in winter wearing Bermuda shorts than it is to find a babysitter and get a night out to the movies with my wife.

Oh, sweet Buddha… is today a bad one. We’re taking a look at Battleship: the Movie.

“Gaze upon my works and despair!” – Director Peter Berg

I hope you’re happy, people. For years, I tried to warn you that there would be consequences for your buying tickets to Michael Bay movies. But no one listened.

Are you happy now? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?!?

Alright, to be fair, Michael Bay had nothing to do with this. But that makes it even worse. It means people out there looked at Michael Bay movies and are trying to replicate them.

That means, HE’S REPRODUCING, PEOPLE.

Someone, somewhere took a look at the Transformers movies and said, “Yes. These are the modern cinematic masterpieces of our era. I want to replicate that director’s style.”

Which, to remind you, included this…

The Mayans were right.

So I’ll be talking about Battleship. Which doesn’t actually contain a battleship until about 90 minutes into the movie. This is the least of our problems.

Now, I laughed and mocked the idea of Battleship: the Movie when I first heard that Hasbro had sold the movie rights to the game. But, to be fair, it was possible that they could have pulled this off. A period piece set in WWII about a game of cat and mouse between two fleets could have been an intense, taut action thriller with the right script and director. You could even keep Liam Neeson as the fleet admiral and tell the tale of him trying to outwit his equally intelligent Japanese counterpart.

Someone in the studio, however said, “@#$! it, let’s just put some CGI aliens in it.”

“Look, Mr. Kitsch, I don’t want to hurt you, I just want a refund on the $15 I spent to see X-men Origins: Wolverine and Hugh Jackman wasn’t listed in your Earth phone book.”

Alright, I suppose we could start with the protagonist, Taylor Kitsch, who I’m not going to slam as an actor. The guy does a serviceable job. It’s just his character is a douchebag. And for future film students and would-be directors and scriptwriters, it is NOT a good sign for a movie when the audience wants to punch the lead character in the face.

Kitsch plays Alex Hopper, a loser crashing on his brother’s couch who refuses to hold down a job and gets pissy with his older brother for suggesting that maybe he should do something with his life other than get drunk and hit on girls in bars. Alex takes this reasonable suggestion to mean that he should commit a few felonies and break into a convenience store to steal a chicken burrito for the woman he was hitting on.

For some reason, I’m guessing massive head trauma earlier in her life, the girl takes this sign of reckless stupidity as a reason to date Alex, who is then shipped off to the Navy and finds himself under the command of his new girlfriend’s father, Liam Neeson who cashes a paycheck by being in this movie for all of about 10 minutes.

Alex (or Lt. McDouche) is about to get kicked out of the Navy after fighting with a Japanese officer, but as luck would have it, aliens show up.

You see, NASA discovered an earth like planet and send out a message via a satellite that is only in position once every 24 hours. Let’s call it the Chekov satellite.

Not that Chekov.

Aliens answer, one of their ships smashes into a satellite, because they can master space travel, but not slightly turning to the left or right to avoid small objects. Even the aliens from Space Invaders could do that.

But don’t think about that, look explosions! Pretty! Falling buildings, it’s just like the opening to Armageddon. People paid a lot of money to see that movie, right?

The rest of the aliens opt to land near Hawaii and put up a shield that encompasses the state and locks the combined US and Japanese fleets out of the way, except for three destroyers which promptly fire a warning shot at the aliens and are attacked as the alien ships launch Battleship pegs that tumble down and blow up two of the ships. But let the third ship go because it would be a pretty short movie if they didn’t.

I mean, sure, they try to explain it in terms of the aliens only attacking things that are a threat to them, but they later show them trying to sabotage the surviving destroyer anyway so they obviously recognized the destroyer as a threat and by all accounts should have just blown it out of the water.

So what? They have some reverence for life? They have a moral code against killing people that aren’t shooting at them?

No, not really, because via the classic Independence Day mind meld, Lt. McDouche discovers that the aliens have previously vaporized other worlds and the aliens themselves later send out there obviously inspired Transformer type vehicles to destroy a large part of the local freeway, killing anyone trapped on it. So they don’t really care about innocent lives. And, it should again be noted, THEY ARE TRYING TO KILL US ALL ANYWAY!

They let them go because the plot demanded it. They don’t fire on them later because the plot demands it.

It should also be noted that Lt. McDouche, through his own reckless actions, is responsible for the deaths of many of the sailors on the Japanese destroyer and would have killed his surviving crew in a suicide run.

Meanwhile, McDouche’s gal (a physical therapist working with injured vets) is tasked with trying to stop the aliens from utilizing NASA’s communications array to send word back to their homeworld to send more ships.

Well, our heroes kill the aliens, blow up the communication’s array and save the day via help from a retired Battleship and her WWII veteran caretakers in another homage to Bay and McDouche gets a promotion and gets Liam Neeson’s approval to marry his daughter.

What did I enjoy? Well, the acting is serviceable, I guess. Liam Neeson classes up the joint a little bit.  The sight of the old vets gearing up to have one last hurrah is enjoyable.

Other than that, the plot is stupid, the movie is big, dumb, loud, which is normally the trifecta for being a summer box office hit, but perhaps after suffering through three Transformers movies that followed the same format, America finally put its foot down and said, “Enough. Have you at last no decency?”

At least until Transformers 4 comes out.

Stop the madness, folks.

 

Movie Reviews for people with Small Kids: Snow White and the Huntsman

And time for another edition of Movie Reviews for people with kids, wherein I review movies that are six months to a year old, not because I’m lazy, but because being a parent with small children it is easier to get a turnip and a wombat to mate successfully than it is for my wife and I to get a night out.

Interestingly enough, having a wombat wake up in bed with a turnip is the plot of Hangover Part 3: the Wombatening.

It’s not. I just like saying wombat. Wombat. Heh.

This week, I take on Charlize Theron, Thor, and a block of wood in the cinematic, uh… experience: Snow White and the Huntsman.

Kristin Stewart shown here conveying the incomprehensible human emotion “Happy”

Let Mortal Wombat begin!

Ready…. Fight!

Alright, so it’s a movie based loosely on the fairy tale. Charlize Theron plays the evil queen, who pretends to a be a prisoner of an evil magic army, so that the Snow White’s father, the king, will fall in love with her and marry her, so she can kill him in their bed chamber, open the castle gates to her real human army, and steal the kingdom for herself and her creepy brother with whom there is an implied incestuous inclination.

All well and good so far, but then the Queen opts to keep the child whose father she murdered and whose throne she just usurped alive, imprisoned in a tower in her castle. She has no reason to keep her alive at this point. She doesn’t know that Snow White is the key to her immortality, she just spares her life, but locks her away forever presumably.

Queen Charlize has not read the evil overlord list.

My noble half-brother (or in this case, step-daughter) whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.

In fact, it’s useful to have the list open while watching this movie, because you’ll be able to spot all sorts of problems with Queen Charlize acting like a clichéd evil overlord and not like a woman who just executed a smart, ruthless plan to seize power.

Here’s a list of her shortcomings that I came up with:

I will not order my trusted lieutenant to kill the infant who is destined to overthrow me — I’ll do it myself.

Later in the movie, when Snow White has grown up, the evil Queen discovers that if she just eats Snow White’s heart, she’ll be immortal and powerful forever. The evil Queen dispatches one guy to her prison cell without backup or guards guarding the door to the tower and Snow White promptly escapes and locks her idiot brother into her cell.

• I will hire a team of board-certified architects and surveyors to examine my castle and inform me of any secret passages and abandoned tunnels that I might not know about.
• My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

Snow White’s method for escaping the castle is to slide into the sewers through an open hole that is big enough for a man to crawl through. Amazingly enough, the Queen doesn’t order her minions to block the entrance with a grate or iron bars or something that would let sewage through but prevent people from using the sewer tunnel as an access point to her otherwise secure castle. Suffice to say, this decision comes back to bite her in the butt later.

I will only employ bounty hunters who work for money.

When Snow White escapes into the Dark Forest, the Queen’s brother (the aforementioned idiot) suggests getting Thor the Huntsman to go and get her. Thor refuses to do it at any price until the Queen intimates that she can resurrect his dead wife which she can’t do, so, I’m not sure what they thought would happen when he found out, but predictably, he helps her escape.

I will not gloat over my enemies’ predicament before killing them.

Seriously, villains… this never ends well. Stop it.

I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve.

Late in the movie, when Snow White has raised and army and stormed her castle and killed her soldiers, the Queen unleashes a flying, shapeshifting, metallic, magical swarm creature that cannot be killed and is wiping the floor with Snow’s troops. The question of why she didn’t just unleash this thing when they were all outside of her castle or why she never used this thing to go breach the castle of her enemy the Duke is never answered.

But having a villain who falls prey to stupid behavior isn’t the only problem of the movie or even the biggest problem of the movie. That falls to Snow White… our aforementioned block of wood.

I’m happy!

Okay, Snow White is what is generally referred to in fiction as a Mary Sue. She is a character whose positive traits are told, not shown to us. She is innately special because… she is. She makes everyone fall in love with her without doing anything, pledge themselves in loyalty and sacrifice their lives and happiness for her because she’s so darn special. But she never actually shows us that. She mostly walks around looking a bit stoned, so that when she finally has a bite of the poison apple, you’re hard pressed to tell that she’s unconscious. If you strapped her to a dolly and kept her upright, you couldn’t tell the difference.

Kristin Stewart shown here conveying the human emotion: Sad.

Chris Hemsworth does a serviceable job as the Huntsman, but really, the story lives and dies by the Queen and Snow White and overall, I was a bit let down.

Given the two movies based on Snow White that I’ve seen this year, Mirror Mirror is definitely the better one.

Snow White and the Huntsman is good for a $1 rental, but not much more.

Movie Reviews for People with Kids: Lockout

Welcome back to Movie Reviews for People with Kids. It’s a place for folks (like myself) who find it easier to build a full scale replica of the Bismarck out of toothpicks than secure a reliable and trustworthy babysitter on a Friday night, although sometimes it’s been so long since I’ve had a date night with my wife that I’m tempted to offer the job to the first person I meet on the L.A. subway.

Aw, come on, Honey, kids love clowns!

So I’ve reviewing movies that came out 3 months to a year ago that I find in Redbox when there’s nothing good on TV.

Tonight, there’s action. There’s romance. There’s crazy Scottish gangsters. There’s SPACE PRISON! That’s right, it’s time to look at Lockout.

One man in a facility out to rescue the hostages from a group of terrorists. In space, no one can hear you DIE HARD.

Guy Pearce is Agent Snow. He doesn’t even need a first name. He’s just Snake, er… Snow. So you know things are about to get frosty.

In your face, dude…

Snow is arrested and accused of murdering an undercover agent and is going to be shipped off to MS One… The SPACE prison. Yes, at some point, the United States government has said, “Screw the normal Super Max prisons we could easily build down here on Earth for a few million dollars, we’re going to build a SPACE prison that will cost billions of dollars” and they now incarcerate the worst of the worst in SPACE prison. Where they keep the prisoners in stasis which really kind of makes prison pointless, doesn’t it.

I mean, part of the deterrent of prison is that you’re awake, locked in a cage and your every move is controlled by agents of the state that don’t particularly care for you and don’t mind beating you with batons or tasering you if you step out of line, as well as dealing with all of the other psychopaths who might also want to shank you or stitch a bomb into your colon.

See, Dear, he could teach the children useful first aid skills!

 

Getting sentenced to take a ride into space where you’ll sleep through your entire sentence before being released back into society at exactly the same age and told don’t do that again, seems less like a punishment and more like a holiday. I mean sure everyone you know and love will probably be dead, but you’re a psychopath who’s the worst of the worst so chances are good you’ve already killed them and eaten them yourself with a nice Chianti.

Anyway, I digress…

SPACE Prison! Is being visited by the President’s daughter, Maggie Grace, who is a typical girl in distress who is visiting SPACE Prison! after hearing rumors that the stasis process turns some of the psychopaths into gibbering idiots or even more psychotic lunatics, and her security details ends up setting off a chain of events that ends with her as a hostage, most of the station crew dead, and Snow sent up to get her, find his old partner, get the evidence that would exonerate him, and get everyone happily off the station before the Space Police (Yes, the Space police, what’s your point?) blow SPACE Prison! to smithereens, which appears to be the only job of the space police, because absent some shady Ferengi, there’s not a lot of crime happening in space, people.

No, I’m not saying all Ferengi are criminals, I’m saying the existence of Ferengi should be considered a crime.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the entire SPACE Prison is outfitted with enough firepower and weaponry to fight a pitched military battle in space, because, of course it is. I mean, who knows when the Martians will randomly show up to SPACE Prison and attack.

No, no, this film is too silly for us and that should tell you something.

Guy Pearce does a decent job playing Random 80’s Action Hero #237, and Maggie Grace is equally competent as his reluctant partner and love interest and the movie has all of the requisite steps along the way you’d expect from a big, dumb, 80’s action movie, including plenty of explosions, one liners, and skydiving from low orbit. And a resolution to Pearce’s B-plot that completely and utterly defies any semblance of logic that the film tried to maintain.

It’s a stupid movie, is what I’m saying, that makes no sense if you stop and think about it, so you try not to and just enjoy it for what it is: a modern take on the 80’s action genre.

It’s on DVD in Redbox, it’s worth a dollar and 95 minutes of your time if you look back on the Golden Era of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Russell, and Willis with fondness or if like me, you hear the worlds SPACE Prison! and immediately know that this is a cinematic event you simply must see.

Movie Reviews for people with kids: Happy Feet Two

And now for a bonus Movie Reviews for people with kids, which has less to do with finding an appropriate family movie, than about stating how it’s easier for a stormtrooper to actually hit a target than it is for me to organize a date to the movies with my wife.

Today as a bonus, I’ll review Happy Feet Two.

3 of these toys will be available in your Happy Meal at your local McDonalds. The fourth toy, the one your kid actually wants, will be in only one Happy Meal distributed to a McDonalds in Anchorage, but we’re not going to tell you that.

Happy Feet told the tale of misfit Mumbles the penguin who had the misfortune of being a bad singer in a tribe of penguins that used their singing talents to find and select their perfect mate. Eventually, he wins the girl and saves his tribe through his unusual talent of dancing and annoying talk radio hosts with his message of “hey, maybe we shouldn’t destroy the entire planet, we might end up killing some animals that entertain us too.”

Happy Feet Two tells the tale of a group of Hollywood suits who wanted to make more money.

“I like money.”

The End.

Fine, there’s also the part where they break an iceberg and save a colony of penguins with the power of dance. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to quiet the screaming voices in my head by slamming it repeatedly into my desk.

I’m alright.
Me too.
And me!

Alright, okay, fine. It’s about a little penguin chick named Erik who is the son of Mumbles who feels bad because he can’t dance and oh, sweet Buddha, look it’s a Robin Williams penguin again and oooh, there’s my desk again.

Look, I realize I’m about thirty years past the prime demographic for this movie, but if you’re going to create some wretchedly cute fuzzy animals with which to entice our children, the least you can do is try to make it entertaining for adults, and having starving penguins throwing themselves down a steep incline like bobsledding lemmings in an ill-advised attempt to give evolution the middle finger just doesn’t count.

Curse you, Charles Darwiiiiiiiiiiin!!!!

This movie has all of the heart of a commercial for used cars and appears to exist mostly because the first one made an ungodly amount of money, which means I’m sure Happy Feet 3 is in the works, assuming the nine muses don’t say “Screw it” and opt to hurl a giant meteor into Hollywood instead.

Dear God, why did you send Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to try and blow it up?!?!

I guess what I’m saying is I didn’t like it.

Movie Reviews for People with Kids: The Pirates! Band of Misfits

In which we take a look at films that have been out for quite some time because as a parent of a small child, you would find it much easier to walk into Mordor and drop a bit of jewelry into a volcano than organize a night out to the movies.

Quiet, you!

Tonight I look at The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

Despite the promise, my booty remained firmly attached to my posterior. Seriously, what is the world coming to if you can’t trust pirates?

This is another film that might actually be suitable for children. Well, yours. Mine weren’t at all interested in watching this flick and they watch Barney so their standards are not high.

The Pirates! follows the crew of a pirate ship oddly enough. Led by the less than infamous Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) they set out on an adventure to win the Pirate Captain the title of Pirate of the Year.

The humor is very British and funny at times, but more often than not falls, so the movie sort of exists in the place between great and crap which I guess is mostly just okay.

You know that’s the exact definition of “Okay,” don’t you?

And he wonders why I never invite him to parties.

The Pirates! (I refuse to continue typing out that subtitle every time I mention the movie) has sort of charming quality to it that makes you want the movie to be better, but it never quite gets there. It’s sort of like the scrawny kid in high school who really wants to play football and you know he’s never going to play in college or  the NFL, but he has a lot of heart and spirit so you put him in and root for him anyway, only to see him blindsided play after play until he can barely tell you who the president is.

It’s President Freeman, right? And there was a comet about to hit Earth? How’d that work out?

Close enough, son. Walk it off, you’ll be fine.

Likewise I watched this once trying to find a family film for our children to enjoy with us, but can’t imagine ever sitting through it again unless my children demanded it. And considering my son hated it and my daughter was more interested in running around screaming like a banshee, I’m guessing I won’t have to.

Wait for it to show up on cable. It’s… well, it’s not the worst way you can spend 90 minutes.

We meet again, you soulless purple demon.