Thursday, January 31, 2013

Parker



If you liked the movie Payback starring Mel Gibson or Melly as I call him; then do yourself a favor and stream it from online.  This way you can just watch it again rather than paying money to see the banal Parker which is based off of the same bad but good guy book series. I see every Jason Statham movie that is released in American theaters but even I was hesitant to give Statham’s poor excuse for a new Maybach a try. How did I know it was going to be a complete waste of time? Jennifer Lopez. A few months ago I called Kate Hudson the career killer but in reality she learned all of her awesome moves from the serpent in disguise that is J-Lo.  If you look at her history you can clearly see that she was basically the end of Bad Boy entertainment as we knew it when she was a part of the club shootout with her then boyfriend, Puff Daddy. We all really secretly thank her for that though. But I guess she figured that simply destroying a label wasn’t good enough. So she set out to destroy hip hop altogether by teaming up with the 5’2” banderillo named Ja Rule, who with his wack style had already put the initial daggers in music to make the catchy yet detestable I’m Real. Basically the antithesis of  Run DMC’s Walk This Way. Then there was the Ben Affleck relationship which was capped off by her refusing him a bachelor party so they could make the wonderful Gigli together. And no race was apparently safe as she then she spread her disease back to her Hispanic roots with poor poor Iglesias. Somehow George Clooney survived her but Statham is no Clooney. 

And this brings me back to Parker. It’s essentially the same story as Payback in that Parker (Statham) partners up with some undesirables to do a job that they get away with but when it comes time to divvy up the money, his partners have other plans in mind. Parker of course is simply satisfied with his take from the score and turns down their offer to use it as a bank roll for a bigger job, so the crew led by Melander (Chiklis) decides that he needs to die. By the way his name is pronounced chick less; haha yes I’m 12 years old. Anyway, Parker somehow escapes a shootout that takes place in a moving SUV and sets out for revenge on these thugs who live without a code. He finds out that one of the guys is connected to the Chicago mob and uses that connection to track them down before their next score. He eventually ends up in Palm Beach and through the help of local real estate agent J-Lo he finds not only where they are holed up but where their next score will be.

On the surface it sounds like any other criminal out for revenge movie and that’s the problem. Nothing seems fresh about this movie at all, especially the aging J-Lo. I get that the producers were trying to reach out to her loyal Hispanic followers along with a few big booty loving Black guys (guilty as charged) but was Eva Mendes not available? Jenny from the block still has an amazing body but man her face isn’t quite amazing anymore; and she never really could act, so why not go get a younger hotter version of her? She basically plays the role of the annoying kid in the movie. Statham is his usual cool self but they pair him up with a blond girlfriend who is simply average looking and has the body of a 12 year old; which is a bit discomforting because she gets naked all of the time in this movie. It makes you feel like you’re watching an R rated version of Moonrise Kingdom and you keep waiting for the Feds to bust down the door and arrest you for watching underage…nevermind. I don’t want to actually type it out for fear that some perv google searches that phrase and ends up on my site and then I have feds reading my awful reviews and stalking me. But hey, I could use the readers.

But back to the lecture at hand, outside of a few and I mean few cool death scenes, this movie is boring. The Chicago mob’s best henchmen that was sent to kill Statham is lame because he’s old and his weapon of choice is a pocket knife. A pocket knife??? Why not just have him throw a killer shoe at people? There’s not enough action in this movie and it’s missing the comedy element that a crazy Mel Gibson brought to Payback. 

I say skip this movie as I give it a rating of WEAK! Why? Cuz I’m Real!! The way you walk, the way you talk, the way you smile…
 

Monday, January 28, 2013

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters



I am not sure what is with Hollywood’s recent fascination of taking children’s fairy tales and adding in swords, guns, blood, and boobs to them but I have to say that I like it! They re imagined the story of Snow White and for some strange reason added in an Australian huntsman who leads an army of soldiers and dwarfs in a quest to kill a blood hungry queen; who just so happens to also take cream baths to help keep her young. It ended up being the sexiest non commercial for Oil of Olay that I have ever seen as Charlize Theron prances around naked for about 10 minutes!  In Hansel and Gretel, they make them witch hunters and give them access to mini guns, sawed off shotguns, and air rifles while the women try and keep their breasts from popping out while they are spraying down evil baby stealers. Hopefully this trend continues with classics like Goldilocks and The Three Bears! They could have Hayden Panettiere play Goldilocks; but in this version they  give her a horny boyfriend who convinces her to rebel against her strict parents by finding the perfect place to consummate their relationship. So they stumble upon the bear’s quaint little home and proceed to do work! Meanwhile the bears come home and each says “Someone’s been banging in my bed! And I don’t even want to begin to think about what they just did with my porridge!” 

I have an even more graphic vision of what they could do with The Three Little Pigs but you get the idea. Pretty soon instead of learning early life lessons about the consequences that come along with being greedy or lazy, our children will be obsessed with guns and strippers and will probably become sexual deviants to boot! Is this good for our future? No, but I am more concerned with my weekly entertainment than I am growing a fleet of perfect young Bradley Coopers to take over the world! 

But back to Hansel and Gretel : Witch Hunters. MTV Productions (enough said) in the opening scene gives you the classic fairy tale of a brother and sister abandoned in the woods by their father. The next morning they run into a house made of candy and get lured inside where a scary witch awaits to lock them up, fatten them up, and eat them up. Well the kids in a desperate attempt to escape find that they not only have the skills to kill a witch but are also immune to their spells. Years later you see that they have made a successful business of going from town to town destroying witches that wreak havoc on the small communities that cant defend themselves. They eventually stumble upon a town whose children are being stolen from right under them and the locals are beginning to suspect that every woman in the town is a witch. Hansel and Gretel while tracking the witch down find out that there is something bigger that’s in play here and are in a race against time to find her before it’s too late. And that may have been the cheesiest line I have ever written in my life!

Hansel and Gretel are played by Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton respectively; and maybe it’s because Renner happens to be 15 years older than her in real life but it honestly never really feels like they are twin brother and sister. There’s no real chemistry between them so it comes off feeling more like they are third cousins who just met for the first time at a family reunion. At least in this case it would be ok for them to hook up, well in the state of Kentucky it would be. But you get over this the second you see them break out shot guns and mixed martial arts to beat down witches. I just wished that they didn't try and give them this bored rock star attitude when dealing with the locals. It just comes off as lame and made them seem rigid. Even when Renner hooked up with the cutie good witch Mina (Viitala) it seemed like it was such a chore for him to do so. Oh well at least you got a pleasant surprise in a nude scene here.

The movie never bothers to explain why they have access to guns in this land far far away but because they do, this makes this one of the more violent films that has come out recently. Heads are exploding, bodies cut in half, and evil sheriffs are being stomped to death by giant trolls every 5 minutes. And that is just fine with me! While the plot is ridiculous there’s enough action, blood, and hot women on screen to make you look past that key point. The only complaint I have in regards to the women in this film is that the director thought it would be a good idea to make Famke Janssen look like a cross between Aphex Twin and unisex Marilyn Manson! I know she’s gotten a little up there in age but she’s still a fox. It was pretty comical however that they made her henchmen witches look like Lincoln Park. If you’re gonna go wack, you may as go wack all the way! 

As much as I would like to rate this movie fresh, I couldnt live with myself if I did. This movie is kind of WEAK! 


Thursday, January 24, 2013

Broken City



I am not sure what’s with my luck in movie theaters lately but just know that if it’s awful then it probably has happened to me in the past month. For example, during the most intense chase scene in Mama, some clown sneaks up on me running at full speed! After he scares the living hell out of me, I realize that dude was just trying to get back to his boyfriend. Ok that’s fine but it’s not like you were A. missing out on THAT great of a movie and B. if you were worried about your boyfriend sneaking out and ditching you when you went to the restroom, you would hope that he would at least have the common decency to do so during a Les Miserables showing so that you were given a fair chance to find a replacement for him immediately. 

Then there was my experience at the end of Broken City.  I never really understood the love for Marky Mark that every single woman on this planet has; I’ve always thought he looked a little too much like the apes he played opposite of in Planet of the Apes but whatever, I’m not going to hate on the guy. He's done well for himself since his Funky Bunch days and he actually has his hands in some decent productions like The Departed and Boardwalk Empire. But apparently the love for Marky doesn’t just end with women. So once the final credits started rolling, this guy who sat two rows in front of me stood up, stretched his arms, pulled up his pants, zipped his zipper, and then buckled his pants!!! It was at this point that I realized that we were the only two people in the theater. What in the world was he doing the entire time? Did he really like the movie that much? What if he thought he was the only one in the theater the entire time, saw me, and then became so embarrassed that he decides that he has to kill me? And what if someone had done what he just did in my seat the showing before? “We just shared a moment bro” Raffi from The League. I just cowered further into my seat hiding from the guy and realizing that I was probably sitting in dried up semen, about to get killed, and the last thing I saw on this planet was a Marky Mark and Russell Crowe production! Is there really a worse way to go?

So I wont spend too much time on the plot because it’s pretty convoluted but ultimately it leads to a pretty predictable ending. The good thing is that you don’t really see the entire movie in the trailer like it seems you do but honestly it’s pretty close. The movie starts out with Marky Mark who plays a NYPD cop, shooting and killing a random thug in the projects. There’s a big uproar in the community because they feel it was unjustified so he goes to court and is found innocent of any wrongdoing. Russell Crowe plays the mayor of New York City and basically relieves Mark of his duties because there is some evidence that could surface that would be damaging to the case and to the city. But he promises to take care of him at some point in his career. Well the movie then takes you 7 years after this incident and Crowe is up for re-election against a local nobody in Barry Pepper and it is actually a tight race between the two. Marky Mark is a struggling private eye who is barely able to make ends meet with his indie actress girlfriend. 

The movie picks up steam when Mark finally hears from Crowe to help him find out who his wife is cheating on him with. Once he finds out who it is, that very same night the cheating man ends up dead. And it’s especially interesting based upon who it is. This is when the tangled web of lies and deceit starts to unravel, but once it does you just realize that it wasn’t really all that interesting to begin with.

The acting in the movie with the exception of Zeta Jones (who still looks good for her age) is actually pretty decent. The main issue I have with this movie is that it tries to be Michael Clayton but Marky Mark is no George Clooney, Zeta Jones is no Tilda Swinton, and Brian Tucker is no Tony Gilroy. So instead of leaving the theater amazed by the dialogue and seeing yet another side of evil when it comes to corruption, you are just left feeling like you saw another Law and Order episode. It’s not an awful film but it’s not a good one either. With one of the Hughes brothers directing you would at least expect to see a lot of blood and graphic violence but you don’t even get that. The only cool thing A Hughes did was film Marky Mark at a level ground as everyone else so you could see how short he really is. So the fact that he was effortlessly beating up dudes twice his size look even more ridiculous than it normally does.

Overall I rate this movie as WEAK and suggest that you stay home and save yourself the semen experience.
 

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Mama



Jessica Chastain as a punk rocker with tattoos, dark hair, and tight Misfits t shirts??? Who cares if there’s an actual story to accompany this! It’s like someone in Hollywood is living out my fantasy of turning hot actresses into whatever you want! Just look at what they did with Jennifer Aniston in Horrible Bosses; they turned her into the super dirty girl that we all hoped she could be.  All you have to do is wait until they’re old and desperate enough to keep getting attention and next thing you know they’re holding bananas next to their mouth and dropping it like it’s hot! I’d talk about how this also applies in real life but I do actually want to get a date in the next 6 years so I’ll just move on. 

The studios kept hyping this movie up as a Guillermo del Toro production, and while it is produced by him and has his fingerprints all over it, the movie is actually directed and partially written by Andres’ Muschietti ; who directed and wrote the short version of Mama in 2008. The story is about two young girls who are abandoned in a cabin in the woods after a horrible incident involving wealthy people. They never tell you their ages but they appear to be around the age of 4 and less than 12 months old at the time. The story then shifts to 5 years later where the girls’ uncle played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau aka Game of Thrones ‘ Jaime Lannister (as a matter of fact I’m just going to refer to him as Lannister from here on out) has exhausted whatever money he inherited from his brother trying to find them. His punk rock girlfriend (Chastain) is trying to be supportive but she’s also in a band, likes to party, and feels that in no way she’s ready to have kids. 

Well one day the girls are finally found but as you can imagine, growing up in the woods with no human to raise them had some pretty damaging effects to not only their cognitive development but to their social development as well. They basically moved around on all fours like animals and communicated only in grunts and screeching growls. The young couple struggles to get them acclimated to normal life but what impedes their progress the most comes in the form of the ghost that raised them for those 5 years; a shadowy figure that the girls refer to as Mama. Mama has seemingly followed them to their new home and is not quite ready to give them up. 

As Mama wreaks havoc you see Chastain slowly growing into this mother role as her natural instincts kick in and she tries to not only form a relationship with the girls but also protect them from what she perceives to be a threat to them. For the most part her portrayal of the rocker girlfriend is a pretty decent one with the only funny moment coming when apparently Mama was not a fan of her bass guitar skills. One night while practicing a song, Mama goes ape shit and nearly kills everyone in the house. But for some reason I was he only one in the theater who was laughing. Lannister is barely in the movie and is basically there to look pretty; which is good because he actually turns in an awful performance. 

The best part of this movie is that del Toro only produces it. Just like in The Devil’s Backbone, he has this knack for introducing a scary figure or ghost and creating a genuine fear of it but then he basically humanizes it as the film goes on and you start to identify with the antagonist. So the entire tone of the film completely  changes and it essentially becomes Edward Scissorhands. The same happens here for the most part but not until the final 10 minutes of the film when Muschietti finally allows you to see the ghost in it’s full form. Overall Mama doesn’t look too bad but she does look like the librarian ghost from Ghostbusters 1. “Get her Ray!!!” Up until that point, he did an excellent job of using shadows, light, and clever camera angles to make Mama as creepy as possible, otherwise this movie basically would have been The Grudge 3. Also the way the younger kid continued to move as an animal at times and crept around in the darkness added yet another disturbing element to the film. I am never having kids for fear that one of them will be perched on the dresser in the corner like a raccoon while I'm trying to have sex with it's mother!

As far as horror movies go, this one is pretty entertaining and I rate it as FRESH! Next I think I will take my Chastain as a blond stripper, thanks! 
 

Monday, January 21, 2013

The Last Stand



It seems like celebrities and athletes live by a different set of rules in life than the rest of us. If they get caught driving  drunk ,busted with pot,  or shoplifting it’s kind of laughed off as “oh, those crazy kids” and they get at a slap on the wrist. And I honestly I have come to accept this for what it is but what I can’t accept is rewarding stupidity and cheating on your wife with Consuela the grandma housekeeper with millions of dollars! I will give you the fact that Maria Shriver was starting to look like Arnold and it would be kind of weird to have sex with yourself all of the time but how can this guy not be clowned on for the rest of his life? I mean, I hook up with a moose ONCE and I still hear about it on holidays and at large gatherings. But not Arnold, he gets rewarded with a multi million dollar paycheck and a major studio release directed by South Korea’s Jee-woon Kim! So what do I along with at least 50 other idiots do on a Saturday afternoon? We run to catch this stupid matinee in hopes of some awesome one liners and the occasional head exploding. 

Well with a few scenes this movie actually delivers just that but overall there simply wasn’t enough freshness to quite justify the $7.00 spent. It’s a rather simple story in that head FBI agent Forrest Whitaker and his team lose a dangerous and ruthless Mexican drug lord in Gabriel Cortez in an attempt to transfer him from a holding facility. Through a number of daring maneuvers, Cortez’s military trained gang is able to not only outsmart the FBI but are also able to get him in an exclusive, not on the market Chevrolet race care to help him escape. Yes, I think you know where this is headed. Meanwhile in the peaceful town of Sommerton, Sheriff Arnold Schwarzenegger and his deputies are investigating the mysterious murder of one of the local farmers and are led to believe that it is linked to the recent arrival of these random truckers led by the always solid Peter Stormare (he was the cooky doctor in Minority Report). Well as Cortez continues to evade the FBI, they are left with no choice but to depend on this small town’s cop force to stop him before he crosses the US border into Mexico in what will essentially be THE LAST STAND! !! (in Ahnuld voice)

This movie basically plays out like a made for Showtime or TNT movie; and honestly had it had a competent young actor as the lead sheriff it might have worked. Instead we get stuck with Ahnuld who’s English has somehow gotten worse as well as his already non existent acting skills. It was such a chore for him to deliver any of his lines, including his one liners. The rest of the actors actually do a halfway decent job and the directing makes it feel like a real movie but ultimately you keep coming back to the leathery, creepy, and smiling face of Ahnuld. 

Kim does what he can to keep you entertained but he was burdened by not only Ahnuld’s acting but also by the fact that this movie is one long Chevy commercial. They really should have just had Toby Keith come in and sing during each of the car chase scenes, which were actually pretty fresh. But before each chase they always put in a stupid and pointless 2 minute description of the car and its capabilities or they just included an elongated shot of the latest Camaro that is sure to hit your nearest showroom floor. I kept waiting for Megan Fox to be draped over the hood.

He also throws in some pretty sweet night vision gun battles for gaming geeks to go crazy over. But the crowning moment of this movie is when Stormare and his gang come to Sommerton to take out the small town cops.  This by far had the most engaging action, coolest shootouts, and some of the movie’s best comic relief, most of which was provided by Johnny Knoxville (who looks like the years of MTV stunts and groupies has aged him). But sadly this 20 minutes doesn’t quite make up for the 60 minutes that preceded it or that 20 minutes of a stupid car chase in a corn field that followed. I wont even begin to talk about the “American” they had locked up who’s accent kept slipping for no reason and sounded like a Colombian at times.

Overall this movie is WEAK but I was entertained so it’s not like it’s awful. I would just recommend waiting for Netflix. What might have elevated this movie to freshness would have been if during the opening scene, Ahnuld came in from the sky via a lightning bolt, killed the local sheriff, threw on some shades, and said “I’m Back!!!”.