Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
December 27, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Gore Verbinski and the entire cast of major characters from the first film return to continue the legend of Pirate Jack Sparrow (Depp). I would not say it is better than the first film but it does hold it’s own in today’s mass of big summer disappointments. That being said, there should be no reason to dwell on the back story so let’s just get to it. If you want back story watch the Curse of The Black Pearl before going to see Dead Man’s Chest, otherwise off we go.
Jack Sparrow and the crew of the Black Pearl run into an old friend from there past in the form of Bootstrap Bill Turner (Will’s father). Bootstrap tells Jack that Davey Jones is waiting and the time to pay his debt has come. Apparently ol’ Jack sold his soul to Davey Jones in exchange for command of the Black Pearl. The deal stated Jack would be Captain of the Pearl for 30 years and at the end of that time he would join Davey Jones aboard the Flying Dutchman, for the rest of eternity. If any of that seems obscure I apologize but there are certain aspects of the film you need to see to truly understand.
Meanwhile Elizabeth (Knightly) and Will (Bloom) have their upcoming nuptials interrupted by a new magistrate when he arrests both of them, and condemns them to death for helping Jack escape (more back story). This arrest is really nothing more than a ploy to get Will find Sparrow instead. The new magistrate being a member of the East India Trading company (even more back story), really just wants the ‘broken’ compass that Jack carries around and could care less about Will, Elizabeth or even Jack himself. Seeing as how there aren’t many options available at this point Will agrees to find and recover the compass in exchange for their freedom.
That is the gist of the story and suffice it to say the search leads to many adventures with exotic locales, and intersting creatures that will drop your jaw to the floor. The makeup/cgi in this movie is absolutely off the charts and the performances from Depp and Knightly are great as usual… Bloom is Bloom, wooden as always. But the best part of this film by far is Davey Jones, his ship and his crew. In the Black Pearl the effects guys us to charts unknown with the skeleton pirates and them walking on the sea floor, the effect of the crew and the Flyin’ Dutchman blows that away, if that’s any indication where the bulk of the production cost went IMNHO. I don’t like it when a movie relies solely on effects to get you to buy a ticket but when they are coupled with strong acting and a cool story it’s so worth it. Pirates of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is worth it.
Be warned as seems to be the case lately… Stay until the credits finish (roughly 3 hours 10 minutes with commercials and previews) for a last little treat.
Night at the Museum
December 25, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Night at the Museum is a whole lot of fun to watch. Sure, the story is predictable but who cares when you’re laughing your butt off?
Ben Stiller plays Larry Daley, a middle aged dreamer who bounces from job to job while he looks for his ticket to greatness. He’s not a slacker, he just doesn’t think he’s suited for a “regular” job. Since he bounces around a lot he doesn’t have much money, and tends to get evicted rather often. Larry apparently doesn’t mind, but his ex-wife points out to him that his instability really isn’t fair to his son Nick. When Nick doesn’t tell his dad about “parent career day” at school Larry takes notice and decides enough is enough, then gets himself a job as a night watchman at the Museum of Natural History.
The position is available due to budget cutbacks at the museum, management is looking for a new guy to replace the 3 aging guards played with flair by Mickey Rooney, Dick Van Dyke and Bill Cobbs. After a short tour (and avoiding a fist fight with Rooney!), Larry is given an instruction manual and locked inside the museum for the night. Being a guy the first thing he does is play with the intercom system… then, he takes a nap. When he startles himself awake he sets off to check the place out and notices things have… changed.
Thanks to a magic Egyptian tablet, everything in this museum comes to life each night at sunset and returns to their normal state when the sun rises (feel free to skip the logic issues with the museum being closed and cleared out before sunset each night in the winter, and that Larry got to work, played with the intercom and fell asleep before it got dark on his first night… logic would kinda ruin this movie.) Cavemen are trying to build fire, the Huns are rampaging, lions hunt, monkeys cause mischief and miniature Romans and Cowboys from the diorama battle each other to expand their territory. It’s an ordered chaos and Larry has to maintain the status quo each night.
Of course there’s a villain and some extra drama added to help pace the movie, but the real joy is watching the humor brought on by the all star cast. Robin Williams is excellent (it’s calm Robin, not manic Robin), Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan have some great scenes, Ricky Gervais basically reprises his role in The Office and Mickey Rooney put a huge grin on my face.
When you go see this (and you really should see this in a crowded theater) be sure to stay through the first part of the credits for some extra scenes… Dick Van Dyke has some moves! Four stars for this one, if it had a bit of a stronger opening I would have given it a fifth.
The Flintstones - The Complete Sixth Season
December 22, 2006 | Leave a Comment
The Flintstones lasted for 6 years and by the time this last season aired they has just about run out of ideas… so how about bringing in an alien?! Yeah, this is the season with The GreatGazoo. It’s also the season with Bewitched, My Fair Freddy and The Treasure of Sierra Madrock. Good episodes yes, but let’s all be grateful they didn’t go for a seventh season.
Just in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, The Flintstones is an animated show that started back in 1960. It follows the antics of two couples, Fred and WilmaFlintstone and Barney and Betty Rubble. The setups are all standard sitcom stuff from that time period and it works very well. The “modern technology” is always amusing to watch and the situations are really quite funny.
What falls apart in this collection is the picture quality. I’ve read some reviews on Amazon where people talk about how great it looks.. and they are lying (or have crappyTV’s .) The video has NOT been cleaned up very well, there are many artifacts and scratches still present and in a few episodes the color is shifted to green on one side of the screen. Might not be noticeable to some people but it stands out quite well on both the plasma and LCD projector I’ve tested this on. Audio is fine, I just wish this looked better.
The show itself stands up to the test of time quite well. I grew up watching The Flintstones on WTBS everyday and just popping the DVD into my player put a smile on my face. It was also nice to see the openings to these episodes that I didn’t even know where there! Like many shows today they all started with something before the opening credits, butWTBS apparently trimmed that out for some additional commercials. Damn you Ted Turner!
Anyway, I love the show and recommend this set to anyone who’s a fan. I’m holding back a star simply because they didn’t treat the material with enough respect during the mastering process.
Rocky Balboa
December 21, 2006 | Leave a Comment
It takes guts to dig a 16 year old character out of mothballs and parade him around for a new generation; especially if that character is wrapped in a 60 year old body and that body will be shown for all the world to see. But, that’s exactly what Sly does by giving us the 6th installment in the Rocky franchise… All I can say is I hope I’m in that kind of shape when I hit 60.
Rocky Balboa is the final chapter (I Hope) in a storied cinematic career that for all intents and purposes ended as well as it began. This go round Rocky is basically going through the motions of his old age. Adrian is dead, Rocky Jr (Ventimiglia) is working for a firm downtown which means he hardly sees him anymore, Paulie (Young) is constantly breaking his balls for living in the past, and all he has in the world is a little restaurant where people come to hear him ramble on about his past glories. All in all things are not going well for Rocky so he decides to improve his situation.
Rocky (Stallone) wanders into an old tavern where he runs into Marie (Hughes), a girl that Rocky used to know (See Rocky for more info) and Rocko starts to form a relationship with her and her son. Rocky gets the feeling that his depression is related to loneliness but even after building this new friendship he still feels hollow. Until one day when ESPN runs a segment on ‘What If’ that claims Rocky would defeat now champion Mason ‘The Line’ Dixon (Tarver) if they had fought each other in their prime. Rocky gets to thinkiing on a comeback and after a very strong chat with his son he decides the only thing he needs to get on with his life is to get back in the ring one last time and prove he can still go the distance. Sounds like a decent story and it is so you should go check it out.
Rocky Balboa is actually a really good movie and in my opinion the best work Stallone has done in years. Former light heavyweight champ Tarver is pretty good as Dixon but the best part of all about this movie is the passion of the story telling. Stallone had one last chapter to tell and for my 10 bucks I felt like it was well spent. Subtle, quiet calm resonates from the dialog and the simple yet deliberate way Stallone brings an icon like Rocky back to life is almost enough to forgive Rocky V… Almost.
Kung Pow!: Enter the Fist
December 12, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Some of you are likely thinking I’ve lost my mind to be giving Kung POW:Enter the Fist a 5 star rating, but if you liked The Naked Gun and The Three Amigos, I think you’ll understand.
If you know Steve Oedekerk at all it would be from his writing and directing skills as he wrote the screen play for The Nutty Professor II and wore both the writing and directing hats for Ace Ventura:When Nature Calls. He’s also made a name for himself as a producer being involved with both Patch Adams and Jimmy Neutron:Boy Genius of all things. What does all this tell you about Steve? Well, other than the fact that he really likes movies with colons in the title, it lets you know that he knows a thing or two about comedies and isn’t some no-name person who managed to get a movie made.
The premise of the movie is pretty straight forward martial arts stuff. Once every 1000 years a “Chosen One” is born who will defeat evil, you’ll be able to tell he’s the Chosen One because he bears a particular mark. In this case, the mark is a little working face on his tongue, and evil is a Master who has decided he wants to be called “Betty”.
OK, ok, that doesn’t sound that funny, and if that’s all there was to it I would agree. Here’s the real catch though, this movie is a remake of the martial arts film Savage Killers, and by remake I do mean remake. Steve bought the rights to the movie and decided to re-edit it with additional characters and dialogue. Think of is at Mystery Science Theater on steroids. Instead of just making fun of the movie Steve has actually made a new movie out of it that expertly makes fun of the martial arts genre.
There are way too many sight gags in the movie to get it all in one viewing, and like Police Squad and The Three Amigos this movie will be fun to watch over and over again, especially if you have a bunch of friends over and a few drinks to pass around.
We debated almost 2 weeks here at MFG before deciding on the 5 star rating, but in the end the pure silliness of it won us over. See it, love it, buy it, share it with your friends.
The Da Vinci Code
December 4, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Having read The Da Vinci Code several months ago, I figured that I would not have much of a problem reviewing the movie. I really loved the book and I felt that if the movie was anywhere close to it, we’d be looking at 4 stars at a minimum. Well, things aren’t so clear cut.
Throughout my life I have encountered books and movies that carry the theme that there are some secrets man was not meant to know and The Da Vinci Code falls squarely in that category. In case you’ve been catatonic for the past year, this is a murder mystery of sorts but with implications that go FAR beyond the victim and murderer. Implications that, if revealed, could shake the very foundations of Christianity and perhaps even destroy much of it. I don’t know that I believe it could be destroyed so easily, but I’ve been wrong before.
You might wonder what kind of secret could have that effect. Well, how about the idea that Jesus (as in Mary and Joseph’s kid) took a wife by the name of Mary Magdalene and she later bore his child. I have always been a history buff and I usually find anything that blurs the line between history and religious mysticism to be quiet entertaining. As such, the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s marriage and subsequent parenting of a child has always intrigued me. This is mostly due to how the church, if the story is true, had to have taken some very extreme measures to bury the knowledge of this. The legends are out there; stories of the Priory of Scion and the Knights Templar have existed for centuries and, to some extent, their existence has been proven true.
The Da Vinci Code covers all of these tales and weaves a very intricate history complete with secret societies, christian/pagan rituals, mysterious codes, and implications of complicity of some of history’s biggest names.
The movie starts with the murder and gruesome self-mutilation of the curator of The Louvre museum in Paris. The dying man managed to scrawl some strange numbers and phrases on the floor as well as a message to find Dr. Robert Langdon (Hanks). The French police, believing Langdon, a visiting Harvard professor of Symbology, is guilty of the murder, bring him to the Louvre hoping to trick him into a confession or some kind of self-incrimination. Enter Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a cryptologist with the French Judicial Police. She tells Langdon that he is in danger and that the police wish to charge him with the curator’s murder. Why is she doing this? Because she is the dead man’s granddaughter and she knows that Langdon could not have killed him.
From there, the two go on the run while simultaneously trying to figure out who the murderers were and what secret the curator and three others took to their deaths. Several very powerful men and groups enter the fray, each with their own agendas and some not evident until the very end.
Based on past experiences I was expecting big things from director Ron Howard. This project, however, was HUGE by any standard and I wasn’t sure how - or if - he could live up to it. After cogitating on it for a while, I have to say that I don’t think he has. He has done a very good job with certain aspects of the film, but there are a couple of areas that just flat-out didn’t work for me.
First up is the casting. There has been a lot of rumbling out there that Tom Hanks shouldn’t have been cast in this role and I am going to have to agree. He’s a fine actor but, like several other huge stars, Hanks does a very good job of being himself. What I mean by that in this case is that his personality and that of the character of Robert Langdon, don’t mesh well. In the movie, Hanks seems somewhat lost and meek. In the book, Langdon is certainly no macho action hero, but he was certainly a stronger character than Hanks portrays here. In his scenes with Sir Ian McKellen, Hanks perks up, especially during their little arguments, but he is still somewhat flat. Hanks may be a good actor, but Mckellen is head and shoulders above him and it shows here.
Thankfully, the rest of the casting is fantastic. The choice of Tautou to play the part of Sophie Neveu was simply inspired. She’s gorgeous, petite, vulnerable, but still quite fiesty. McKellen, as mentioned above, was fantastic as well. Journeyman actor Jean Reno (who single-handedly made The Professional a fantastic movie) is brought in to be the grizzle french detective, Captain Bezo “The Bull” Fache and he carries his role perfectly. By far the creepiest role I’ve seen in a non-horror movie in a long time went to Paul Bettany, who plays the albino monk Silas. If ever there was a twisted soul, his would be it. From the book I remember descriptions of Silas and his actions that gave me the shivers and I darn near felt them all over again while watching some of his scenes.
However, all these great performances only serve to underscore how weak Hanks’ effort was. It is quite sad when a multi-Academy Award winner gets upstaged in nearly every scene he’s in.
Another area I found lacking was the dialogue. There were several lines in the movie that came out just downright awkward. More than once I almost found myself chuckling and I’m quite sure that Howard and Co. didn’t intend for the moment to be funny. One in particular that I remember had Hanks sounding almost as if he was trying to ad lib a moment of comedy into the scene.
I was, however, glad to see that the story was followed reasonably faithfully, which is quite a feat considering how complex things were portrayed in the book. Howard manages to preserve much of it here without it becoming confusing or numbing. This, to me, is the most important part of the movie. The murder, the flight from law enforcement, the character relationships - these are all just things to keep us from losing our concentration on the real meat of the story which is the quest to unveil staggeringly important things from the coverup of history.
Overall, I think I liked the movie. Enough to give it a strong 3 stars, but the weaknesses in it keep it from getting anything higher. Even so, I would suggest going to the theater to see it if, for no other reason, than to be able to converse about it intelligently since the rest of the world is destined to see it at some point. At the very least, you won’t ever look on the Star of David quite the same way ever again.
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