Category: movies

The Transporter 2 Could Be Good

Ashley Bischoff11 Comments
Screenshot from The Transporter 2 Trailer

Have you seen the car flick The Transporter? In short, it’s a bit like Ronin-lite. (And, contrary to what the customers who participated Hagerty Insurance’ poll think, in my opinion Ronin is the best car movie of all time.) In any case, even though The Transporter is dumbed-down to a PG-13 rating, it makes for a decent action flick. Well, to be sure, the first third sports some amazing driving while the latter two thirds is a bit more cookie-cutter (it’s worth a rental).

Enough about the first one, though; The Transporter 2 is coming out in September and Apple has the trailer online. While it’s true that trailers can be deceptive — even Van Helsing's trailer made it look halfway bearable — I have a good feeling about this one. I mean, the John Woo allusion (which I’m not going to spoil for you here) is almost reason enough alone to put this movie on my good side ;).

On the downside, there is an overabundance of kids for a few seconds worth of the trailer; let's hope that scene is just as short in the final cut of the film. And, likewise, the “seatbelt” joke falls a bit flat (not that I expect every movie's one-liners to be zingers, but you'd think only the better lines would make it into the trailer). All the same, I’m looking forward to seeing what Metacritic has to say about it (Metacritic is a movie/film/game review aggregator, assigning a “Metascore” to each work based on the overall critical reception).

PS In case you need to take a screenshot from Quicktime but find that you're ending up that area of the image blank, you may find these video-screenshot instructions helpful, as I did.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith Might Not Be Horrble

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

I have an aversion to PG-13 rated action movies. Invariably, I get the sense that the director is holding back — there’s absent or rare blood on the screen, violence which moves off screen as it becomes more intense and a general lack of suspense. For example, X-Men was fine — I didn't mind seeing it once — but I would have preferred not to have spent $8 to see it in a theater. And don’t even get me started on how awesome Anakin’s lava scene in Episode III could have been with an R rating.

For many years, there was only one PG-13 action film which I thought of as worthy of repeat viewings, Goldeneye (aka Bond 17) which also happens to be my favorite Bond movie (yeah, yeah, pipe down you Connery nuts in the back — his films were good too, but they just seem a bit anachronistic to me these days). As it turns out, I joined Netflix earlier this year and I’ve recently added two other films to that list — Hellboy and one other film which I’ll get to in a moment. (Then again, is Hellboy perhaps more of a sci-fi movie or even a comic book movie than an action flick?)

The film Mr. and Mrs. Smith opened this weekend and I’ve been largely doing my best to ignore it. At first, its mere PG-13-ness put me off; soon after, the hype surrounding supposed Pitt/Jolie affair made me even less interested in the flick. However, I looked it up on IMDB and learned that Doug Liman directed it — the same guy that directed The Bourne Identity.

You may have already seen where this is going, but The Bourne Identity is the remaining item on my list of PG-13 movies that I would consider seeing multiple times. I rented it through Netflix and watched it a few weeks ago. It’s almost two hours long but I didn’t find myself checking my watch at any point during the movie. The acting was good and the action was fairly lively within the confines of its rating.

Getting back to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I realized that I couldn’t completely discount the Liman effect. Granted, not every director makes great movies every single time, but even if Mr. and Mrs. Smith was half as good as The Bourne Identity, it’d still be a fun time. I then checked Metacritic to see how critics scored it. (Metacritic, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a movie review site that publishes a “Metascore” based on an aggregate sampling of many critics’ reviews.)

I’ll concede that Mr. and Mrs. Smith didn’t actually do very well at Metacritic, at least not in the conventional sense; it got 55/100. However, among the critics that I’ve found to be reliable — and which have tastes in movies similar to mine — they mostly liked it:

  • The Onion (A.V. Club) / Scott Tobias — “Rarely does a word like “deft” come to mind when viewing any film released between May and August, but Liman and company make it all look easy.”

  • Film Threat / Clint Morris — “Thankfully, Liman’s film is not the equivalent of a piece of stale cheesecake — all look, no taste — because the script’s as tight as a scout-tied noose.”

  • Salon.com / Stephanie Zacharek — “Some people will see “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” as cynical, but I think its heart is deeply romantic, admittedly in an anvil-on-the-head kind of way.”

I’m not saying that I’m ready to sing the praises of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But, it’s probably better than I initially thought it was — maybe even venturing into “good” territory. If nothing else, I’ll toss it into my Netflix queue if I don’t end up seeing it in theaters.

Review — Kicking and Screaming

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about Kicking and Screaming; I participated in that offer.

I saw Kicking and Screaming on Tuesday night and I rather enjoyed it. In case you haven't seen the trailer — which appears to be just about everywhere these days, including as a promotional spot on my TiVo — the movie stars Will Ferrell as a reluctant soccer coach of his last-place kids’ soccer team.

It’s hard to pass up a gratis pass to a movie screening and, at the time it was offered to me, I didn’t know much about the film. Well, I knew that Will Ferrell starred in it and that it was about a kids’ soccer team. And, really, that’s all you need to know. It's a sports movie — so all the standard sports-movie clichés apply — and it’s also a father/son movie — so all those clichés apply too. Just to name a few:

  • Don’t read these if you’re really scared of spoilers
  • The coach of a father’s son’s soccer team drops out, so the father has to take over
  • The father is pretty bad at coaching, at first, but gets much better at it with practice
  • The team is a bunch of misfits in last place and, miraculously, they make it to the championship game
  • And, of course, there’s the obligatory cute-kid-with-glasses for comic relief (gee, where have I seen that before?)

Having said that, though, the movie was enjoyable from start to finish. Sure, not all the jokes were home runs (or “gooooals”, I suppose) but I had some good laughs in there. In particular — and I don’t want to ruin the punchline — the scene where Will Ferrell’s character tells his son that his son’s grandfather traded to another team has a nice twist after Ferrell’s character Phil ends up getting more worked up about the situation than his son. Oh, and apparently (if my eagle eyes don’t fail me), his son Sam uses Safari for his web browsing ;).

(Minor spoilers in this paragraph.) I’d recommend the movie to just about anyone if this genre is your bag. My only gripe, I’d say, is that the flick tended to fall back on its formula towards the end. So, Phil ends up being an effective coach but he’s just too mean and he wants to win at all cost, even to the point of benching his son who isn’t one of the better players… blah. blah. blah. His son feels discouraged and doesn’t even suit-up for the final game. Of course, Phil realizes the error of his ways, emotes an apology to his son and — how convenient — Sam’s mom happened to bring along Sam’s uniform “just in case” he decided to suit-up.

All the while, though, the filmmakers are beating us over the head with the supposed compassion of the scene through the old trick of the swelling strings. And, it wasn’t just a little bit here and there — they really poured it on and I felt like I was bobbing in a swimming pool of violins, gasping for air. Really, I could have imagined any one of these quotes spurting from the from the mouth of the director as they edited that scene:

  • “I’ll be honest… fellas, it was sounding great. But… I could’ve used a little more swelling strings.”

  • “I got a fever! And the only prescription… is more swelling strings!”

One last thing. Maybe it was me, but it seemed like there were an inordinate number of songs within the soundtrack which were also featured in iPod commercials. The song from the new rollerskating commercial (“Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz)? Yeah, that’s in there. And that older one from the commercial with the hipster and the dancing posters (“Ride” by The Vines)? That too.

Netflix’ Recommendations Don’t Always Work

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I signed up for Netflix earlier in the week and my first set of movies — Hero, Anchorman and Napoleon Dynamite — arrived on Friday. And, I watched them this weekend:

  • Napoleon Dynamite — I hadn’t seen this one yet and felt that I couldn’t hold out for much longer as there were too many pop culture references to it among my friends that were whizzing right by me (not that I was really avoiding it in the first place). And I now know the response in case someone asks “So, you got my back and everything, right?” ;).

  • Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy — This is a spoof of 70s newscasts which stars Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate. Well, that’s how the studio would bill it — to me, Fred Willard is more of a draw than Applegate these days (and I mean that as a complement to Willard). Oh, if only Willard could have had the starring role — while I think Ferrell can hilarious, he amplified the role from mere parody into caricature. I really wanted to like this one, but I didn’t really.

  • Hero — This is an epic martial arts flick set in pre-unified China. As IMDB puts it, “A series of Rashomon-like flashback accounts shape the story of how one man defeated three assassins who sought to murder the most powerful warlord in pre-unified China.” Now, don’t get me wrong — the movie was beautifully shot and the martial arts were exceptional. And, the sword fight within the falling autumn leaves was stunning and has some fabulous use of color between the adversaries’ red cloaks and the falling yellow leaves. However, I ended up bored by this one; there’s a good dose of martial arts but the non-martial-arts segments just plodded along for me.

I went to the gym this afternoon and, while I was pedaling along on the elliptical machine, it occurred to me that I should check for World Rally documentaries on Netflix.com later this evening. For those who aren’t aware of it, World Rally is a driving sport where drivers don’t race on a track:

Rallying is a form of motorsports that is run over ordinary roads rather than in specialized circuits used in Formula One or off-road environment used in endurance events like Paris-Dakar. In distinction to rallycross in rallying drivers compete against the clock, not directly against the other drivers. And in distinction to rally-sprints, stages used in rallying are much longer (up to 40 to 50 km, average being 10 to 30 km) and special co-drivers are used to call pace notes. […]

Or, put another way, have you ever flipped through the channels and come across a race featuring cars which resemble the Subaru WRX and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo flying along dirt roads? That would be World Rally. In any case, I searched Netflix for “rally” and came across “World’s Greatest Rally Cars”. Well, I was pleased to find that; granted, it was from 2001, but I don’t get Speed Channel on my cable system (the only network which carries World Rally) and I was eager to find anything.

I then clicked through to the category for that disc’s genre (“Motor Sports & Biking”) to see what else I could find. There, I also found Skip Barber’s film “Going Faster”, a film about (you guessed it) how to drive faster. I already have the book by the same name and I found it very useful for improving my times in autocross. I added that to my queue — so far, so good — and Netflix presented me with a list of “Other Movies You Might Enjoy”… one of which was “Kathy Smith’s Pregnancy Workout”. Bwhah?

I suppose that Netflix’ recommendation system tries awfully hard but I guess it has an off-day every now and then ;). I’m not even really sure how it would think those two films are related. I mean, it's not that pregnant women would be autocrossing (as I would imagine that the G-forces could be disruptive to the baby). All I can figure is that a lot of guys that go autocrossing also have pregnant wives… or something?

Constantine — Review

Ashley Bischoff7 Comments

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about Contantine; I participated in that offer.

You know that feeling you get after suddenly waking up in a movie theater after having dozed off? You’re thinking “What�s going on?” and “What just happened there?”. Yeah, that’s how I felt the entire time as I watched Constantine. Except that I was wide awake the whole time. And that mostly summarizes the screening for Constantine which I went to last night.

Other than the trailer for it preceding In Good Company, I hadn’t heard much about it — the trailer featured a heroic Keanu Reeves in a black & white suit sporting a gun, with plenty of demons and ominous dialog about heaven and hell. How bad could it be? And, the movie started off on the right foot — the WB logo faded in and slowly crumbled into the breeze as an off-screen wind blew in. Unfortunately — and I mean this unsarcastically — the movie went downhill from there.

[Very minor oh-that’s-cool spoiler in this paragraph.] Sure, it had its high points. I mean, one of the early scenes featured a demon-possessed worker who strolls into a road, unaware of the oncoming traffic. He ends up walking right into the path of a car which is unable to stop in time — and the worker remains standing like an immovable force while the car buckles around him.

So, the movie had its cool moments, but I had no idea what was going on. The plot goes something like this: Keanu Reeves plays John Constantine, a man who helps “keep the balance” between the demons of hell and life on earth. And, there’s this woman who jumps to her death. And, there’s another woman that’s a detective. Oh, and Satan and God have a pact that demons must remain in hell but that each of them can sometimes influence the minds of humans. Let me put it this way: Constantine’s plot could form the basis for a new Chewbacca Defense.

It’s not uncommon for directors to have reoccurring signature elements which they incorporate across several works. For instance, James Cameron likes to show feet trampling things and his movies often involve nuclear war. Well, a little IMDB checking reveals that Francis Lawrence directed Constantine. And, as this was his first foray into movie directing, I couldn’t make direct comparisons across a stretch of movies. But, I did notice several themes which kept coming up. To be fair, though, they were more like fetishes at the level with which Lawrence was marinating the audience in these elements:

  • Smoking — Yeah, John Constantine smokes and, to Lawrence’s credit, this didn't automatically make him a bad guy. But his cigarettes and Zippo-style lighter just about made enough appearances to warrant an entry in the closing credits.

  • Water & Fluids — For some reason, whether it’s blood pooling or water hurling into the air, this guy loves fluids. I mean, had he toned it down, it could have been a theme worthy of a snide remark in the director’s commentary, but it just left me thinking, “What, more fluids?”

  • Bugs — Sure, bugs are gross, but that doesn’t mean they should be the go-to device for ready-made creepiness. Having said that, even though the movie is creepy at times, it wasn’t scary to me. But, it had its gross moments. And every gross moment was bug-based. Just a warning — if bugs wig you out, you might want to skip this one.

This movie may sounds pretty bad so far, but there’s yet another draining feature: the kid sidekick. Sidekicks rarely work well in movies (though I’ll acknowledge that there are a few exceptions). And, kid sidekicks are almost always a bad idea. Granted, the kid isn’t some youngster, but he isn’t old enough to drink, either. And, as you might expect, he does little more than act as a sounding board for John Constantine’s one-liners and provide some comic relief every now and then.

Maybe the script just needed another rewrite. Or maybe some would-be “oh, I get it now” scene got left on the cutting-room floor. Either way, I’d skip this one. It’s not boring — I’ll give it that — but I just couldn’t follow what was going on. Then again, it might be salvagable as a rental if supplemented with gratuitous use of the fast-forward button.