Toy Story 3 - Pretty much what everyone else said: good adult humor, sentimental moments and a great ending for the series in my opinion. Pixar delivers a very good film up to their usual standards. I also wanted to ad that the short at the beginning, "Night and Day" was great. 9 out of 10. The A-Team - It's a good action movie. I actually liked it better than Iron Man 2 with IM2's 90 minutes of talking. It has some humor and plenty of ridiculous, unrealistic but fun to see action. I was also surprised how well I thought each actor was in each of their roles. Even Jessica Biel did a decent job in a role where her breasts weren't the real stars. 7 out of 10
Jonah Hex This movie was stupidly bad, which was why we went. Josh Brolin's accent was hilarious (seriously the next time you hear anyone bitch about Christian Bale's growl as Batman...point them to this movie), Megan Fox couldn't get her accent right, John Malkovich looked like someone had just woken him up from beside a dumpster surrounded by empty bottles and said, "Here, act in this." The whole thing was cheesy as hell, and at one point, I thought the dog was going to explode for no reason. Everything in this movie explodes, although it's unclear how or why. Also the fight scenes served very little purpose. Literally, there was no clear reason for any fight in this entire movie except the final one between Hex and Turnbull (Brolin and Malkovich). There was little good to this movie and given the talent level on board (Brolin, Malkovich, Lance Reddick-Cedric Daniels from the Wire, Jefferey Dean Morgan, and Wes Bentley with Will Arnett thrown in for comic relief) you wouldn't think something this abysmal would result. I feel like this film could have been a Civil War-era version of Constantine or of Preacher (two comic books whose main characters delved into the supernatural), but instead got turned into Wild, Wild West with Down's Syndrome.
Avatar: The Last Airbender The good: the choreography (I don't know what else you would call it, the kung fu?), the visuals, and the music were all absolutely stunning. The CGI wasn't over done, and after leaving this movie, I want to see more of the cartoon. Also, it had a Daily Show correspondent as a villain. According to some of the people I watched it with, it was loyal to the base material. The bad: cardboard acting and dialog. It just had way too much story to cram into the time allotted and this resulted in forced, painfully obvious dialog. Also, 3D was a complete waste, yet again. Overall: Not the worst movie I've seen this summer, but not good.
I went and saw Grownn Ups with my wife last night, and we were also pleasantly surprised. They actually did a good job of capturing the feeling of going home, meeting up with old friends you haven't seen in a while, and falling right back into the old habits of giving each other shit, and having a good time. I don't remember any jokes that were "lost," and I think they did a good job of keeping the jokes coming without being forced. There was plenty of dumb humor, but nothing overly cheesy or awkwardly bad. The plot wasn't terribly intellectual, but it was put together well, and it was entertaining. In all, nothing groundbreaking or innovative, but a solid way to spend a couple hours with my wife. I'd be willing to give a 4/5. Salma Hayek is smoking hot.
Predators The original Predator (1987) is one of my favorite movies. This one stayed true to the original, down to the "Predator vision", man-in-a-suit production, and music. There will be no acting awards given for this movie, but I think that in a movie featuring hyper-violent aliens, the acting isn't the point. This one had its share of flaws, but if you liked the Arnie original, you won't be disappointed. The good: Lawrence Fishburne as a schizophrenic William Shatner (really.) is fun to watch. The convict character has some comic relief that wouldn't work in a PG-13 movie (Key one-liners: "Your ass is...awesome." and "Man, when I get home I am going to do so much cocaine."). This was a taut movie, so no ridiculous CGI, no ludicrous parkour moves pulled by 9 foot tall aliens, etc. It didn't feel like it was trying to one-up another film with stunning visuals, which made it easier to follow the characters. The bad: this movie does not average an action sequence every 4 minutes. It's spaced out, so it drags at parts. Overall: if you liked Predator, you will like Predators.
I saw Predators on the opening night (Thus last week) , and thought it was a good B grade movie ; which I will happily watch any day over a shit "A grade" movie. Predators doesn't have any pretensions about itself , its just a reboot of the original and the best of all the sequels so far.
Despicable Me: It's a Dreamworks movie, meaning there's an old lady who knows karate and it ends in a dance number. It wouldn't be a horrible movie to get dragged to by your kids (there are some legitimately funny moments involving the minions and the little girl), but overall I felt it was kind of a waste of a lot of really funny actors. Steve Carell doesn't get to act like Steve Carell, Will Arnett wasn't given any funny lines as an angry bank manager, and Jason Segal is completely miscast as a Bill Gates-like super villain. The credits said Ken Jeong played a talk show host but I for the life of me cannot remember him being in the movie at all. Try to convince your kids to go see Toy Story again.
Just got back from an early showing of Inception. The best movie I've seen in the last year and will probably end up being one of the movies of the decade. Absolutely incredible, my jaw was completely dropped through most of the movie. Christopher Nolan fucking delivered. My main initial concern was that it would be too complicated and hard to understand, which wasn't the case. A little confusing for the first half hour, but everything is relatively easy to follow -- it's just completely mindbending.
While very short and not an actual review, tjm got it right. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who think that Freak and Geeks, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get him to the Greek are funny and those who don't. I consider myself the latter and for your sake, dear reader, I hope you do too. It's a shoddily made movie with tons of annoying brit-posh accents in lieu of jokes / Awkward silences in lieu of jokes / Jonah Hill's sweaty face in lieu of jokes / etc. The music is infuriating too.
If any movie is worth your 12 bucks (prices sure have gone up, I had to pay child price because it was inflated that much) it is Inception. Agreed that in the first few scenes it is a little confusing, the levels they delve into things are pretty amazing. It seemed like a little stretch to picture Juno as a smart non hipster catchphrase saying teen, but other then that I was hooked. 10/10
Despicable Me This was the cutest kid's movie I've seen in a while. The minions have a ton of funny little side adventures, one of them speaks a mumbly Spanish that was cute, and those sides were some of the highlights of the movie. You couldn't exactly tell who the voice actors were, which I thought was a good thing (the last kids movie I saw was How To Train a Dragon and we played IMDB during the lagging parts). It wasn't the greatest accent for Steve Carrell to pull off, but the movie was cute, not as predictable as we expected, blissfully short and fun throughout. We saw it with a crowd of couples, and everyone walked out of there pretty happy.
Inception I don't want to give away anything, so I'll keep it short: Go see it. Don't read about it, don't let people tell you what it's about, just go see it. It's that awesome.
I concur with that. It's brilliant. In all honesty, it's almost impossible to give anything away because it is a challenging film to understand completely. The way I've tried to describe it is Matrix + The Sting + Dreamscape.
Inception: Agree on all parts with everyone above. Go see it for yourself, I'm still reeling from seeing it tonight. I plan on seeing it multiple times. Nolan is a fucking genius.
I hate to be repetitive, but I really can't recommend Inception enough. It was just that great, and I have to agree with everyone. Go see it, don't hesitate. See why Nolan is the best director working today (IMHO).
Fuck it at the risk of sounding like an sheep. Inception For me (so far at least) is the best movie of the year. Nolan is slowing becoming one of my favorite directors. Leo is still probably one of my favorite actors with his ability to really bring his characters to life and actually make me feel something for them. The others were amazing in this film I wish Joseph Gordon-Levitt would keep with this style and stay on his game, He is awesome. I cant rave about this movie enough awesome cast, awesome story, awesome directing. Thank you Christopher Nolan Thank you.
Just got back from seeing it. Immediate top of the short list for best picture. Layers upon layers upon layers. Gonna take a couple more viewings to understand it all.
Inception I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I didn't think it was that great. From a writing standpoint, Ellen Page's character was a fucking mess. Absolutely no legitimate motivation for anything she does. She's a mishmash of several well-tread archetypes: at the same time as being the newbie, she also gives Leo -- a guy who's been doing this dream-scaping thing for decades -- sage advice. There's a disconnect there. The relationship between Page and Leo wasn't built up enough to make the climax meaningful. Actually, that applies for all of the characters -- I felt 0 attachment to any of them. There was not a single sympathetic character by the end of the movie. But enough about the God-awful characters. Let's talk about the plot. It felt like two movies were shoe-horned together -- the main plot (breaking up some dude's company on the word of some other dude who moments earlier you were trying to scam), and the romantic plot. Either one would've been a good movie on its own (in different ways, under the supervision of a better writer, and in the hands of a better cast). Together it was broken and disjointed. All that said, I'm willing to accept that there's an argument to be made that it was written in this way on purpose, to put the audience in a position to feel like the movie itself is a dream. If this is the case, fine, Nolan picked a basket of low-hanging fruit and turned it into a supermarket pie. I can't complain about the SFX, though. Great explosions, some ballin' fight scenes, and fantastic visuals. In short: Nolan is a great director, but a God-awful writer. If you're an idiot (at least half of you are), the visuals are worth the price of admission. If you're interested in more than just awesome explosions and fight scenes, this movie might be a little disappointing. Then again, I appear to be the only person on the planet who felt this way about the movie, so it's probably me who's the idiot.
The whole "breaking up a dude's company on the word of some other dude who moments earlier you were trying to scam" happened for a reason. The whole first part was a tryout, Cobb just didn't know it at the time. Saito was looking for a talented extractor and I think he baited that engineering company into coming after him for his "secrets" just to see what Cobb was capable of. Once he saw the dream within a dream, that made him decide Cobb was good enough for his inception plan. I think there's a reason you never really saw a ton of personality other than from Cobb and Mol, but I'll save that for the spoilers thread.
Inception The plot and story is complex but not impossible to follow. You HAVE to take everything they say about idea's and certain points in the story as gospel, or you could find yourself doing the "what if", "why didn't they just do", dance and it could ruin the film for you. I'm not spoiling anything by saying the film deals with dreams, obviously it is a little more to it than that. It is a non-stop thrill ride and film get's away with out giving too much information about the setting or even much background about the characters the story is so gripping it doesn't need too. The special effects and fight scenes are an absolute orgasm for the eyes, amazing I'm not quite sure I have seen anything quite like it. Spoiler The scenes with Arthur fighting the "agents of the sub-conscience in the hallway in zero gravity was fucking insane The movie clearly had a big budget and it shows. Great acting, amazing effects, and excellent entertainment. Best film of the summer and one of the better one's I have seen in a long time, remember don't think outside the box on this one take what they give you and enjoy yourself.