We three Yogis ventured off to see “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” We were a little apprehensive because it is almost three hours long and some of the reviews I’ve read and people I talked to were a little disappointed that the book is being made into a trilogy and the end just leaves viewers hanging.
Well I totally disagree. There is not a dull moment in the movie from the time the dwarves meet at Bilbo Baggins house to let him know they need his help to go recover their lost kingdom at the Lonely Mountain (just go with me here). After eating all of Bilbo’s food and having a good time they leave with a reluctant Baggins.
From there to the end there is nonstop action fighting off Orcs, Goblins, Trolls in a series of horrific fights and battles. Baggins starts off kind of a bookish timid sort to becoming part of the team.
This movie is great. I can’t wait for the other two movies in the trilogy. I give this movie four stars out of five.
Are you looking for a good date movie? Son was with a friend and Sweetie and I picked The Guilt Trip mainly because of its early time slot and theater location rather than its mediocre ratings. We loved this movie!
Seth Rogen plays Andy Brewster a chemist turned inventor turned entrepreneur who is taking his mother, Joyce on a cross country road trip from the east coast to San Francisco where he has set up a series of meetings with store chains trying to get them to stock his new “green” cleaning spray. He has an ulterior motive to bringing his mother along. She tells him in an unguarded moment that her first love was a guy named Andy but it just wasn’t meant to be. Further that she named Andy after this first love and still wondered what if. (her husband died some years ago.) So part of this trip is finding Andy.
The problem is that his mother is still mothering him half to death. Joyce instead of being just a passenger on the trip is an active participant to the dismay of her son. She negotiates better deals on their rental car and motel rooms and offers tips on his product pitches and in general irritates him no end.
As the road trip progresses and they blow up and make up they discover things about each other and get to appreciate each other more.
When they finally reach San Francisco things don’t turn out quite like they or us would expect. What an ending, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Barbra Streisand nailed this movie. She is full of energy and just sizzles, sparks, and pops. She is so expressive and full of energy and expressions. I had forgotten what a great actress she is. Seth Rogen does a great job playing a smart guy who is trying to be a people guy and doesn’t quite get it done. He is the perfect foil to Streisands over the top sociability.
Four stars out of five for this movie. Go see it, go see with your mother! Wish I could.
I get every other Friday off, generally when school is in session we drop SPB off at this school, then we go have breakfast and ride bikes. Yesterday though it was too danged cold to go ride so we ran a few errands and then went to see Looper. The new Bruce Willis action flick.
Looper is a time travel movie. It is set in two time periods in the future. The near period is 2044 in Kansas. Tell you what 2044 in Kansas is not very pretty. Things are pretty bad, I can’t figure out if it is because Romney or Obama won this next election. I wish somebody would tell me. Anyways back to the movie. In 2044 there a bunch of assassins called Loopers. What they do is go to a predesignated spot at a specific time, spread a tarp, wait a little, and then blast with a blunderbuss blasts some poor dumb schmuck who was sent back from 30 years in the future appears and appears out of thin air. The looper collects the silver that is taped to the schmuck and then disposes the body.
You see disposing body in the future is very hard to do so when organized crime wants to off somebody they send them back to the past. The looper’s all very well paid and live the high life in among all the misery.
So far so good right, well the bosses in the future every once in a while for reasons of their own decide to “Close the loop” by sending a looper’s future self back to his younger self to be blasted away. They younger looper then has 30 years to live. A fundamental sin is for the younger looper to let the older looper get away. Then you got two versions of the same guy running around. That’s not good.
Well in this movie Bruce Willis plays the older guy, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the younger version of Bruce, and does a great job also. I think Emily Blunt steals the show playing the shotgun toting single farmer mother who shelters the younger Bruce for a time during the movie.
The movie was well done, the acting was great, the special effects nice, the whole deal. I didn’t really care for the movie that much. We saw lots of schmucks appearing out of thin air and very vividly blasted away with bloody bits going everywhere, lots of torture and disfigurement. There are children murdered (not on screen but the reference is there) and I just don’t care for that. Emily Blunt’s character is the only “good guy” in the movie.
So I’m not going to give a star review. The movie does well what it sets out to do, I’m just not glad that I went to see it.
Sweetie and I went to see “To Rome with Love” the new movie by Woody Allen. It is a complicated, ensemble comedy that has several pretty much disconnected stories set in Rome. The movie ranges pretty wide and uses a medley of American and Italian characters to cover romance, infatuation, mistaken identity, the natures of celebrity, innocence, Pagliacci in the shower, and reconnecting with the past. He also takes a subtle swipe at those of us in love with social networking.
Woodey Allen plays his typical neurotic character (and does it well), Alec Baldwin does a great job, but Penelope Cruz portraying a hooker sent to the wrong room really steals the show. She is smart, sassy, and of course very beautiful.
I loved this movie. I think it sparkles. If you like Woody Allen movies, then you will probably like this one, if you don’t like Woody Allen movies then I don’t think this will be the one that changes your mind.
Guess what it is a pretty good movie. Andrew Garfield plays Peter Parker. As you can guess he is a mild mannered shy kid who gets bullied a lot and takes a lot of crap from everybody. It’s so bad that that Emma Stone, playing fellow student Gwen Stacy has to save him.
Just to spoil it for you, Peter Parker gets bit by a spider and it does more than sting him. He gradually turns into a bratty superhero who spends a lot of time bullying the kids who used to bully him. His aunt and uncle, played by Sally Field and Martin Sheen do their best to calm him down but it takes the love of a good woman Gwen Stacy to get him focused.
And he needs to focus because there is a terribly bad guy on the loose, played by Rhys Ifans who decides to some human trials early on a drug he is developing and he doesn’t have the love of a good woman to settle his little butt down so he and Peter Parker have issues and there is a lot of great fighting scenes in the movie. Spider-Man (who the hyphen this time?) pretty much has to destroy the city in order to save it. Other than that everybody, except for a certain bad guy, lives happily ever after.
I give the movie three stars out of five. Great action scenes but Emma Stone doesn’t quite come across as a 17 year old student. I thought she was a teacher when she first appeared in the movie. Sweetie thought Tobey Maguire made a better Spider-Man than Andrew Garfield, and I have to agree. I also think that Kirtsen Dunst made a better girlfriend than Emma Stone. She seemed more “highschoolish” for some reason.
Speaking of Emma Stone I saw her on a rebroadcast of the Jay Leno show that originally aired back in June. She wore a stunning red leather dress. When I googled the subject it turns out that I was not the only one impressed with the dress. Technically it was a frock by Monique Lhuillier;(Check out the link, they make some great dresses. Next time I’m at Kohl’s I’ll see if they carry any of her stuff. I’ll get Sweetie a gift certificate.)
The video is a little irritating because NBC starts a 30 second commercial.
She is only 23 years old and has a great future ahead of her.
And that is it for this report on Movies and Fashion.
One of the things we did on Memorial Day was venture to our local theater to see Men in Black III. I found the first movie okay but forgettable, I skipped the second, but I really like III. It still has Will Smith as Agent J, Tommie Lee Jones as Agent K, and Josh Brolin playing Agent K also. The Men in Black work for an organization that licenses and controls aliens and possesses technology to make ordinary people forget what they saw and heard when an encounter with an alien gets a little messy.
In this flick Agents J and K are after a real mean guy Boris who, guess, guess, anybody, class?… Is out to destroy the world.
I won’t spoil it by telling you whether the world was destroyed or not but I’ll tell you the movie is very good and has a good story. It has some great time travel scenes and headscratchers worthy of the Back to Future movies. Most movies like these are expensive naps for me and I liked this movie a lot.
I give it four stars out of five, highly recommended! For you parents out there, the film does have some moderate language (which I find irritating in a movie that many kids are going to want to see) and some mild sexual innuendo. The violence is mostly over the top alien stuff with lots of boogery type substance.
I took the day off Friday and Sweetie went to see Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. What a great movie! It is indeed about an effort to bring salmon fishing to Yemen but it also a great romantic movie. It stars Ewan McGregor as a nerdy fishing expert and Emily Blunt as a financial assistant to a super rich sheikh who is financing the venture. The movie reminded Sweetie and I of Local Hero.
I love this movie. I give it five stars out of five. Go see it while you can
Safe House is a great guy movie. It has everything a guy movie needs. Guns, lots of guns of all types, handguns, sniper rifles, machine guns, machine pistols. They had everything but shotguns. They may have had shotguns and I missed it, happens you know. So if your weapon of choice is a shotgun, you may want to think twice about this movie.
Safe House has some great chase scenes. They are not just chase scenes they are more like serial crash scenes. I bet the crashed car budget in this movie was a million dollars. They didn’t crash anything exotic like a Lamborghini or Ferrari. No just your everyday expensive cars like BMW’s and Mercedes. You know they are expensive but they are as cool looking as your niece’s Toyota Camry or your boss’s Lexus, in my opinion
The movie has great fighting. The fighting is hand to hand, intense, very quick and they use everything from fists, to chains, and even broken pieces of glass. The fighting is filmed in close and in HD. You can see the eyes start to pop out when they are getting strangled. I have no idea how they get a camera in on the action and how they keep somebody from getting hurt during the scenes.
This movie even has sports. Now the sport is soccer, which everybody knows is not a real sport but still there are some great field goal kickers have come out of soccer, not that a field goal kicker is a real football player and field goals are not that great either. I mean they are proof positive of failure right? I mean it shows you couldn’t score a touchdown so you had to get a soccer player to bail you out. Kind of humiliating when you think about it, right. They had to use soccer in the movie because it is set in South Africa. They don’t play real football in South Africa. I mean how could they play football with a whole team of field goal kickers. Somebody has to block and tackle and carry the ball. Right?
The movie also has cool dudes. Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds are two very cool dudes. Neither one has any quit in them and they fight, kick, claw, and shoot their way to the very end.
You know what else Safe House has?
A very hot, very sweet, french girlfriend. Meet Nora Anazeder who plays Ana, Ryan Reynold’s girlfriend. She is very sweet, very hot, very clingy, very concerned, and leaves him alone, except when he is showering.
She also does what she is told. In this scene he tells her to get out of town and you know what, she does. She wimpers and cries a little bit but does what she is told. Is that realistic? No, but its every guy’s fantasy. I tell you what is realistic, Reynold’s character occassionally stops his fighting, killing, car crashing, and being a cool guy to call her to check in and see if can pick up anything on his way home and that he is very busy and could be a little late and is that OK. Happens to the best of us. They could have left that out, that’s too realistic.
So, you may be wondering what the movie is about? Who cares its got all the ingredients of a great movie. Go see it. I give it four stars out of five. Tell your wife or girlfriend that it is a romantic comedy. Blame me if they get mad at you.
Sweetie and I went to see The Artist last week. I was a little leery because it was a silent film and well you know it, uh, what’s wrong with a soundtrack?
Well, I’d glad we went. You can check the link above for the plot and all that and what I want to write about was the experience. The acting and the score worked so well together that it was kind of like a ballet. The actors are very expressive. I didn’t feel like I missed a thing but not having sound. Jean Dujardin plays silent movie star George Valentin. Bérénice Bejo plays Peppy Miller the up and coming starlet. The movie is a silent movie about silent movies and the ups and downs of Valentin and the flirting between him and Peppy Miller.
You know something else, the audience in the theater was absolutely silent. Nobody was talking, nobody was making noise, everybody was quiet. That was great but a little unnerving. It just goes to show that people can quit yakking if they want to. I have to admit that one gentleman in the auditorium (not me) started snoring. That gave everybody a good chuckle.
I was glad I went. This one gets five stars out of five. Not just because it is a silent movie but because of the imagination and crativity that went into it. Go see it.
Are you going to watch the Academy Awards? I am. Go to theAcademy Awards Site, vote (not that it counts for any of the results). Lots of good movies this year, THE Help, War Horse among others.
