Danny Trejo was in the Robert Rodriguez-produced Predators earlier this summer, now he’s back, and Machete is a real film.

He’s called Machete because, well, he carries a machete. He’s a former Mexican Federale, double-crossed and left for dead. He’s fled to Texas, working as a day laborer, and there he’s approached by a rich businessman to kill a U.S. senator for money.

Machete!

Mariachi band:

Mariachi!

Machete himself!

Desperado Femme Fatale!

Mexican Dancer!

Nun of the Above!

Nacho Libre!

The Forbidden Dance!

Atlanta Rollergirls!

Silver Scream Spook Show

Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, Orlando, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Seattle, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Washington, DC.

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg will announce the winning city on August 2nd, and will attend the screening in the winning city on August 5th.

The movie has its New York City premiere August 2nd, then this 2nd city premiere August 5th, and it opens in wide release on August 6th.

The Facebook page is here: www.facebook.com/otherguysmovie.

Since I live in Atlanta, I’m voting for Atlanta! Your mileage may differ.

The Other Guys has Ferrell and Wahlberg as second-string NYPD detectives who suddenly find themselves on the proverbial Big Case. You can view the trailer here on YouTube.

You can view the first 5 minutes here:

Or you can watch the video here, or download it here.

Here’s the official site for the film.

If an action-adventure TV series (particularly science fiction) goes on long enough, they usually do “The Most Dangerous Game” episode. This was a 1924 short story by Richard Connell, where an eccentric millionaire kidnaps people to hunt them on his private island.

Here’s a Predator movie that goes along these lines.

Predators

This time around, Tony Stark must deal with an ambitious industrialist (Sam Rockwell) and a Russian bent on revenge (Mickey Roarke, playing Whiplash, although never mentioned by moniker).

Gwyneth Paltrow returns as his secretary-maybe-love-interest, and Scarlett Johannson plays Black Widow (Although again, the character is never named in the movie).

And Don Cheadle has replaced Terence Howard as Tony Stark’s military buddy. Not really necessary, but it works fine.

This is fun stuff, but the movie is a little too busy; there’s too much going on. It lacks the streamlined storytelling of the better original movie.

As usual, stay through the end credits for a Marvel surprise at the end.

Robert Downey, Jr. plays Holmes as a quirky-but-cool eccentric. He doesn’t do a lot of detecting, but he’s ready to box, shoot guns, and generally get into dangerous situations.

Jude Law is Watson, and the two have a funny, bickering, cop-buddy-movie bromance going on.

Lest they’re a little too much into each other, we’ve got Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, in the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories the only woman to ever outwit Sherlock Holmes, to be the spunky heroine.

This all works pretty well. The mystery seems pretty secondary, but that was sometimes true in the original stories. And there’s a lot of nice touches that show the writers have actually read the stories. And there’s a nice CGI recreation of Victorian London, complete with an under-construction Tower Bridge. As a general rule in movies, if you see a building is under construction, the climax of the movie will usually be there, with heroes and villains dangling off the building in question.

Pandora has an atmosphere, but humans can’t breath it without a mask. There are 9-foot tall blue humanoids in the jungle, the Na’Vi, hunter-gatherers. To interact with them, humans have genetically engineered, in effect, biological puppets of the Na’Vi, called avatars, grown in a vat with a mix of human and Na’Vi DNA. Humans go into a tank and are cybernetically connected to their avatar, which they can then use to explore Pandora. Yes, it’s kind of like an avatar in World of Warcraft or other computer games.

Avatar

Also Michelle Rodrieguez (Lost) is a tough-as-nails hovercraft-warship pilot.

Sully, once he is controlling his avatar, finds himself in a strange alien world. The jungle is a beautiful and dangerous place with life forms of all descriptions; flying creatures, others of dinosaur proportions. Even the grass glows with phosphorescence when you run through it at night.

Now comes the conflict: the corporation, and their mercenary-marines, want to relocate one tribe of Na’Vi from their big tree, because the biggest unobtanium deposit is right under it.

Sully, over time, has gone native. Through his avatar, he’s even fallen in love with one of the Na’Vi, Neytiri (played, through motion capture, by Zoe Saldana, who played Uhura in this summer’s J.J. Abrams Star Trek).

Yes, this is basically Dances With Wolves with blue aliens. Dances With Blue Aliens?

But James Cameron brings those little touches that set his movies apart. Here he’s constructed all sorts of future-tech, and a fully realized alien world. Its jungle planet reminds of the worlds created by science fiction authors I read as a kid, like Joe Haldeman, John Varley, and Alan Dean Foster. And there are a lot of elements of Aliens here (especially in the corporate and military trappings of the humans), as well as The Abyss, and, during one battle scene, even a nod to the conclusion of True Lies.

And I realized how dumbed-down big budget science fiction movies have gotten, with this summer’s Terminator Salvation and Star Trek. Both dumb fun, but not chock full of good science fiction ideas, like Avatar is.

So there’s a lot of exploring of the alien planet, and then an eventual showdown between the human marines and the natives, in the planet’s holy of holies, which oddly looks a bit like the Roger Dean cover artwork on old Yes record albums.

The computer animation is spectacular. Does it look “real?” Well, it looks really neat. It looks like the best computer animation you’ve ever seen, or the best next-generation computer game you’ve never played. There’s still a level of suspension of disbelief required, that’s equal if not more to when they did big-budget science fiction movie special effects with puppets and stop-animation.

But you couldn’t have done this movie any other way, and it creates an alien world unlike anything ever created on film. I wondered briefly, would it have been more seamless if the humans had been animated as well (as in Beowulf, for example). But no, having actors like Sigourney Weaver really there sells it.

It’s playing in some theaters in 3-D, in others in 2-D. Also 3-D IMAX. Is the 3-D worth it? Yes it is, but it’s not mandatory, I expect this will look look good on movie screens without 3-D, and also eventually on DVD and Blue-Ray.

The movie is 2 hours and 42 minutes long, so get comfortable in the theater.

I haven’t read the book, so I have no idea how faithful the movie is to the original material. Wes Anderson tends to make movies that are like intricate model dioramas (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the Darjeeling Limited). So the miniatures-and-stop-animation format is right up his alley.

George Clooney voices Mr. Fox, a dapper vulpine. His wife (Meryl Streep) wants him to change his chicken-stealing ways. But the lure of three nearby farms proves too much for him, and he returns to his gentleman thief ways. Meanwhile, his son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is jealous of his visiting cousin, who seems to succeed in everything he tries effortlessly.

George Clooney here finally makes a good crime caper movie. Maybe he’ll resist doing Ocean’s 14 now.

The humor is aimed at adults as well as kids, but there’s nothing inappropriate for kids.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Pixar has a adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel A Princess of Mars (from the John Carter of Mars series) in the works, but that’s years away.    However, James Cameron has mentioned that A Princess of Mars served as some of the inspiration for Avatar.  The book is in the public domain, so, voila, here’s an adaptation starring Traci Lords!

It comes out on DVD on December 29th.   The trailer for it is available here on YouTube.

The first direct sequel to a Bond movie, it starts about 15 minutes after Casino Royale ends. Bond’s in a high-speed car chase in Italy. Then we get a rooftop chase scene in Siena, during the Palio horse race.

Quantum of Solace

I point out just for the record that since there are two Palio horse races in Siena a year, each lasting about 90 seconds, the chances of Bond just happening to get into a chase across Siena rooftops at the same time as the horse race are approximately 85,000 to 1, if my back-of-a-napkin calculation is accurate. This isn’t a criticism of the movie, just pointing out how James Bond is some kind of force who affects probability at a quantum level in his universe.

But where was I. Oh yes, Bond gets into a bizarre trapeze-fight with a bad guy in a Siena church in the midst of restoration, killing said bad guy in the process.   Soon there’s a revelation that there’s a new super-secret bad guy organization that MI6 knew nothing about. Some damn thing (maybe an address on a book of matches, who knows) causes Bond to fly to Haiti. There he kills another guy who attacks him when he enters his hotel room.

Bond seems to spend most of the rest of the movie like this, finding random clues that lead him back and forth across the Atlantic, not really knowing who he’s pursuing or why, but pretty confident that if he just keeps racking up frequent flier miles and defending himself against (and killing) whoever attacks him in the next place he visits, he’ll get a clue and another international flight.

Somewhere in there his boss M declares him rogue and cancels his credit cards and passports and such, but this almost seems more like she’s doing it as an incentive to make him work even harder.

Of course, Bond encounters beautiful, damaged women (if they weren’t damaged before he knew them, they soon are). Gemma Arterton as Ms. Fields (and to the movie’s credit, I don’t think they ever reveal her first name on screen, but, if you know Bond girls, and a certain Beatles tune, and her hair color, you can probably figure it out), and Olga Kurylenko as a woman seeking revenge.

Eventually Bond discovers that the main bad guy is a business mogul trying to buy up seemingly useless land in Bolivia, posing as someone championing the environment but actually doing the opposite. It seems like some of the locals might have noticed his scheme, but it takes Bond crashing a plane in the middle of nowhere to figure it out.

Then there’s a showdown in the Bolivian desert at a fancy hotel that seems to be built out of explosive bricks (Actually filmed at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert).

So, it seems like a plot that even Bond doesn’t so much figure out as just play an elaborate, violent version of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego.

The movie seems to be trying to emulate the Bourne movies, in the frantic pace to the action sequences and the sprinting from one international location to the next with the main character not really knowing why. So… for Bond 23: Stop!

But, despite all this, the movie is never boring, and it’s very stylish, getting Bond into all sorts of scenic locations for the next chase/fight/etc. And it’s very atmospheric.

A lot of people seemed bewildered by the title, wondering what a Quantum of Solace was. It’s a Modicum of Comfort. Now you know.

DVD extras: There’s a regular edition of this and a 2-disk Special Edition.

Regular:  “Another Way to Die” Music Video,  Theatrical Trailers

Two-disc Special Edition:  The above, plus on the second disk:  “Bond on Location” 24-minute documentary, plus 5 short (5-minutes or less) Making Of bits (Start of Shooting, On Location,  Olga Kurylenko and the Boat Chase, Director Marc Forster, The Music), and about 50 minutes of Crew Files, basically excerpts from a web video blog during the making of the film.      Unfortunately, there’s no commentary track on the film.

New York, I Love You

Directors include Mira Nair, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, and Natalie Portman.

Unlike Paris je t’aime, there’s more of an effort to tie the stories together, with characters from one segment making appearance in another. So the effect is like one of those Crash gumbos. Whether this was necessary is debatable; if there are 8 million stories in the naked city, 11 of them don’t really need to intersect.

Many of the stories seem to involve alienated people meeting cute; outside a restaurant for a smoke break, or intersecting in unusual jobs, leading to a possible romantic or sexual encounter.

It’s kind of like making a meal of appetizers. But, if one story isn’t to your taste, another will be coming along in a few minutes.

Set in the distant future Zombieland stars Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a young man on a quest to see his family in Ohio after the Zombie apocalypse has ravaged the entire world and he’s desperate to find one thing that feels like home. Columbus has a knack for talking to himself and along the way imparting pearls of wisdom for us the viewing audience should we ever find ourselves in a similar situation. Perfect example, Rule #1 Cardio… Zombies can’t eat what they can’t catch. There are plenty of these and they’re presented throughout the film, and they’re all hysterical.

Anywhoo, back to the point; Columbus encounters Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) who’s only purpose in this now F’d up existence is the never ending search for a golden flaky, cream filled slice of heaven known to the common man as the Twinky. Which in case you didn’t know actually does have an expiration date of 25 to 30 days, so sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but contrary to popular belief they do go bad. Our two heroes go from place to place in search of these spongy beauties and through this obsession they encounter the final characters of importance Wichita and Little Rock (Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin), who constantly gain the upperhand no matter what the situation may be. Con Artists it would seem come in all shapes and ages when the world has turned to sheeot and you only have a life expectancy of the afore mentioned Twinky, so these girls do what they have to do, including stealing the heroes ride… never rub another mans rhubarb. On that note I’ll stop before I accidentally give away a key piece of info and mess it up for everyone.

The plot is pretty simple at the heart of it all; Zombies chase and eat human kind and our 4 heroes kill zombies to stay alive, and along the way have some very hilarious misadventures, and find out that life is worth living even if its just for the little things.

Zombieland is very heavy on the funny and off the charts on the gore but it’s well worth your Friday night and the cash that it takes to see it. My only question to the readers is this… Is it just me or is Jesse Eisenberg a poor man’s Michael Cera? Or is Michael Cera a poor copy of Jesse Eisenberg? A thought to ponder while waiting in line because those two cats are totally interchangeable.

The Hangover

The premise is classic.  Doug, played by Justin Bartha, is getting married.  So, three of his friends are taking him to Vegas for the classic bachelors last stand a couple of days before the wedding.   These guys have a night in Vegas that is for the record books.

But the story is told in a very unique manner.  We do not see the night, we see the aftermath.  The boys wake up in a trashed hotel suite.  The groom is missing, so is one of the guys’ pants and underwear.   But they do have a few additions including a live tiger in the toilet, a chicken and a baby in the bar.   What follows is one absurb hysterical situation after another as they try to unravel what happened and find the missing groom in time to get him home for his wedding the next day.

This is not a huge name cast, nor a big well known director.   And I’ve seen some of the stuffy critics reviews.   Don’t believe any of them, this movie is flat out funny and looks to be one of the largest comedies of all time.   Unfortunately it probably means we’re going to get a run of progressively worse and worse sequels, but hey, enjoy this first one it rocks!

Go see it, grab it on DVD for your collection.  I’m sure we have a uncut unrated version to look forward to.    This gets 5 stars, I can’t recommend it highly enough.   And be sure to stick around for the credits.

Tarantino loves movies. He loves World War II epics, particularly of the Dirty Dozen variety. He loves espionage films. He loves spaghetti westerns. He loves revenge action movies. He even loves Nazi propaganda films; or maybe more specifically, he admires the skill that produced them.

Inglourious Basterds

It’s also a Jewish revenge movie, for those who’ve wistfully thought, it’s too bad we can’t dig some Nazis up and kill ‘em again.

And it’s also a caper movie. This isn’t a science fiction film, except maybe in regards to an alternate timeline where things play out differently from our World War II. But if you discuss time travel too far into the night with friends, somebody will eventually suggest, what if you could go back in time and change the course of World War II? This movie isn’t overly concerned with the results of that, and more concerned with the bloody logistics.

We follow Brad Pitt’s crew of guerilla fighters, deep inside Nazi-occupied France. Among his crew is a former Nazi soldier whom they liberated because he was in prison for killing his Nazi officers. Also various Jews, including “The Jew Bear” (Hostel director Eli Roth) who has a penchant for killing Nazis with a baseball bat.

Meanwhile, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) is a young Jewish woman whose whole family has been killed by Nazis. She’s now incognito in Paris, running a movie theater. Nazis decide to hold the premiere of their new propaganda film, and she concocts a revenge plan.

Tarantino has his trademark elements. Very dangerous people having long, interesting conversations in restaurants about trivial but fascinating topics, which any moment may break into ultra-violence.

And he even manages to indulge his foot fetish with the movie’s other femme fatale, a German movie star turned spy for the Allies, played by Diane Kruger (National Treasure).

Christoph Waltz is a Nazi officer who manages to be terrifying the more polite he gets (Who else could intimate by ordering a glass of milk?).

The movie is two hours and 33 minutes. Some might say, a flaw in well-done historically-accurate movies about World War II (Like the recent Tom Cruise movie Valkerie, for example) is that, the viewer pretty much knows how it’s going to turn out. In Tarantino’s movie, there comes a point where what I felt mainly was wonder. Wondering, since I’d seen that it had slipped into an alternate universe that couldn’t again end up in our timeline, how in the hell is this thing going to turn out?

Here’s more info on it with a list of theaters.

AMERICAN GRAFFITI (Trailer on YouTube).
A SPECIAL SURPRISE PSYCHEDELIC WESTERN (I have strong suspicions what this is, but since they seem to want it to be a surprise I won’t say. But they do mention it has Chilean connections).
ZARDOZ (Trailer on YouTube).
FROGS (Trailer on YouTube).
SHANTY TRAMP (Poster on IMDB).

More info at their FaceBook page.

Moon stars Sam Rockwell, and is directed by Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie. It’s set in a not-too-distant future where a corporation is mining the Moon for Helium-3 to provide energy back on Earth.

Moon

Sam is a lone astronaut sent to the Moon to oversee one of the automated bases. He has a three-year stint, his only companion the robot GERTY (Voiced by Kevin Spacey), who seems to be a cousin of HAL-9000.

He’s now a short-timer; a couple more weeks and he’ll be sent home. But he starts to observe strange things on the Moon, and he may not be alone up there. Or maybe he’s just going nuts.

This is a neat little movie in its own right, but it’s also a homage to late 1960s/1970s/early 1980s films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Dark Star, Alien, and Outland. And, I suspect, the Moonscapes and miniatures of Space: 1999.

And the Moonscapes and miniatures in this are spectacular, and seem for the most part to be done Old School, with models instead of CGI.

This is a science fiction movie where the story drives the special effects, not the other way around. This is a thoughful film that depicts the Moon as a desolate, hostile, beautiful place. There’s no holes in the space-time continuum, no giant explosions, and the robots don’t transform into sports cars and 18-wheel trucks. It goes where no science fiction film has gone in a long time – up a flight of stairs for your brain to climb.

Lest I be accused of spoilers, this is revealed in the first thirty seconds of the film.

(500) Days of Summer

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt – 3rd Rock From the Sun, the exceptional movies Brick and The Lookout, and strangely enough, Cobra in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie) is a failed architect who works writing copy at a greeting card company. Enter Summer (Zooey Deschanel – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and numerous Indie-films), the cute, ethereal, somewhat spooky new girl at the office. Tom is smitten.

What follows is 500 days of ups and downs in their relationship. We see it out of sequence; it jumps back and forth between the 500 days.

Everyone probably goes through this type of relationship early on; puppy dog love that’s blind to the fact that the object of its affections is actually a slightly different species all together.

One example, after their first sexual encounter, Tom walks through the park and imagines random passersby breaking into a coordinated musical number to celebrate his scoring.

This is a clever, funny movie that has some hard truths about relationships that you don’t always see in a romantic comedy.

And the worst part is, she’s completely honest with him: She doesn’t want a long term relationship, and she’s not seeing somebody else. That said, she is also playing games with him, with a studied obtuseness.

Sometimes the comedy is a little uneven; for a movie that seems to be trying to strike a realistic tone in much of it, it strikes a false note when Tom, in his cups at the nadir of their relationship, is reduced to writing greeting cards like “Rose are red, violets are blue,” (inside card) “Screw you, bitch!” Yeah, it’s kind of funny, but if he’s actually turning these in to his boss, it hints that he’s bipolar or something, not suggested otherwise in the film.

But there’s a lot of good stuff here. It’s a bittersweet comedy, and that’s not a throwaway reference; it’s bitter, and it’s sweet.

I do find myself wondering, if the movie hadn’t tipped us off at the beginning that the romance wasn’t going to work out, how audiences would take it. Disappointed that they didn’t get a typical Hollywood romantic comedy?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the second live action big budget summer block buster rendition of the old Transformers animated series.   Or should I say animated toy commercial?   We loved the original Transformers movie, and we gave it a full 5 stars.   It was quite simply a good time.   Michael Bay and the studios obviously thought more of the same would be even better!

So we get more Decipticons, more Autobots, more fights, more action, and well, you get the point.   But the question is whether more is better?   One of the few complaints we had with the first movie was that during the big final fight there was so much action on screen that you really couldn’t keep up with who was who and what is going on.   Instead of a Rocky versus Apollo type fight, there’s just random robot parts, missibles and bullets flying all over.   Well, we get a lot more of that too!

We went into Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with low expectations.   That’s likely a good thing as we ended up being more entertained that we thought we would be.   What did we like?   Megan Fox running and bouncing in those Michael Bay slow-mo shots for one thing!   The added humor was a nice touch.   There were a lot of cool new bots.

What was not to like?  The action was almost “frantic”.   The plot was predictable at best.   And there was little if any character development.   We do not really get to know any of the new bots, nor do we really find out much about what the others have been up to since the last movie. One exception is a pair of twin Autobots that talk in hip hop slang.  These two suffer from “Jar Jar syndrome” big time as they are so obviously there only to make the little ones giggle and wanna buy toys.   They will annoy most rational adults.

This movie is what we’ve come to expect from Hollywood for sequels.   The summer blockbuster formula is get as much of the original cast as you can, double the action and effects budget, whip up a comfortable safe low risk script, shoot some really cool trailers and let it rip.   But hey, check your head at the door, get in the nice cool theater out of the heat and watch the bots go boom!   Dont expect deep sci-fi, just expect to have fun, and you will.   We give it 4 stars.

Here’s a list of theaters where it’ll be playing on Father’s Day.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

It follows two families, the Greystones, and the Adamas. Both are struck by tragedy when a terrorist plot on Caprica kills loved ones. So if Battlestar is an Iraq War metaphor, this has overtones of 9/11.

But, it revolves around virtual reality technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

Eric Stolz plays Daniel Greystone. After losing his daughter Zoe (Alessandra Torresani, who looks a bit like a younger Zooey Deschanel), he discovers that The Kids Today on the planet Caprica have been playing around in in a virtual reality world to sample the vices that they haven’t done in real life. But he discovers his daughter has left a simulacrum of herself in the virtual world. He becomes obsessed in a Doctor Frankenstein way with bringing her back to life, at least in some form. He’s also developing robotic soldiers for the government. Proto-Cylons, basically.

Meanwhile, he befriends Joseph Adama (Esai Morales), who lost his wife and daughter in the same terrorist attack. His son survives, and, if you watched Battlestar, you can probably guess who he’s going to turn out to be.

The Adama family are immigrants from the planet Tauron. There is prejudice against them on Caprica, and, let’s face it, as depicted here, Taurons are basically movie Sicilians. He’s a lawyer for a Tauron crime syndicate. At times, the Godfather overtones are laid on pretty thick.

Then there’s Laci Rand (Magda Apanowicz), a schoolmate of Zoe’s, who discovers her school may shield a religious cult of dangerous fanatics.

The look of the production is interesting. Like the revamped Battlestar Galactica, it tries to keep fashion and props and architecture somewhat like our world (everybody isn’t dressed in tinfoil outfits) while still trying to make it look like another world in a far-away time.

For the record, I was a mild fan of the revamped Battlestar Galactica. I’ve seen the last half of Season 3 and most of Season 4. I still haven’t seen the first two seasons. It was an interestingly gritty retake on the original series, a big Iraq War metaphor. I think it bogged down sometimes in all the Cylon mysticism.

So I watched this with some misgivings. Did it really need a prequel series?

But it’s actually very good. As science fiction, better than Battlestar Galactica.

It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out as a series in 2010. For now, you can watch the DVD of the pilot.

Complications ensue when he falls for a waitress his own age (Margarita Levieva). As it turns out, she’s a sexual grifter as well.

Beyond the dinosaurs, this does incorporate a lot of atmosphere from the original series. In this version, Marshall, Will, and Holly are not related, and are all adults, so we get a lot of jokes about groping Holly’s boobs. But there are still cliff landscapes, jungles, lost cities, and the lizard-men Sleestaks, along with semi-evolved primate Cha-Ka.

But what it mostly is, is Will Ferrell doing some crude, sometimes gross, and generally pretty funny schtick in dinosaur lands – sometimes Laugh Out Loud funny.

It’s not really much of a parody of the old show – oddly enough, the Sleestaks are played pretty straight. And I’m not sure how much of this really needed to be in The Land of the Lost… pretty much the same jokes would have worked with any time-machine-throws-us-back-in-time story.

But, probably a lot of people seeing it have never heard of the original show.

Quite a lot of the movie takes place in a sort of desert Sargasso Sea of time; where artifacts from our world seem to have dropped in willy-nilly. I don’t remember that in the old show, but maybe that was in the 2nd or 3rd season.

The movie seems a little confused at times as to what kind of farce it wants to be. Still, Will Ferrell dumping dinosaur pee on himself, that’s entertainment!

Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner) is a 78-year-old widower, cranky and living in the same house that his wife and he shared all their lives. In their younger days, they dreamed of being explorers, fans of the Professor Challenger-ish Charles Muntz, going to a Lost Plateau in Peru. Carl has slowly watched his neighborhood devoured by skyscrapers, and developers want to tear down his house as well. After an altercation, he’s threatened with being shipped off to a nursing home. So he straps a whole bunch of helium balloons to his house, and sets his sights on South America.

Unfortunately, a boy scout, Russell, who was trying to get his badge for helping a senior citizen, is inadvertently brought along for the ride.

Once they’ve ballooned onto the Lost Plateau, they encounter strange animals and make a nemesis.

Where Pixar stands out is in story and characterization, not just the computer animation. What hooked me on this was the touching extended prologue where we see the guy grow from childhood to an old man with his sweetheart.

This is maybe less ambitious of a movie than the recent Pixar efforts (Ratatouille and WALL-E – a rat going to cooking school and a robot pantomining its emotions) – but it’s a better overall result.

The clever bit here in the action sequences is, after the balloons have lost a bit of buoyancy, the house has ceased being a float that can carry our heroes weight and more of a floating tether that they have to haul around. This leads to a series of inventive and exciting action sequences revolving around what happens when you’re being chased while towing a floating house.

Also, in theaters this is preceded by a Pixar short, Partly Cloudy. There have been plenty of cartoons about how the stork brings babies, but none quite like this one!

This time, McG directs. And most of the movie takes place in the future post-apocalypse.

Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is on death row in 2003. He donates his body to science. In 2018 he wakes up to discover the world is a post-apocalypse, and killer robots stalk the ruins.  How did he get here?

Meanwhile, John Connor (Christian Bale, who, as we’ve seen on the Internet of late, takes his movie-making ****ing seriously!) leads the Resistance against the robots, getting the few survivors to fight.

Skynet, the killer computer network, has new Terminators at its command; motorcycle-Terminators and underwater-Terminators.

And young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, who’s having a good summer, since he also played Chekhov in Star Trek), destined to go back in time to be John Connor’s father in the first Terminator movie, is in danger here, and John Connor has to take steps to save him.

Bryce Dallas Howard is apparently playing the character that Claire Danes played in the third movie.

This is a pretty good action movie. As Terminator movies go, it’s not in the same class as the first two James Cameron ones, but it’s better than the third one (which is still a fun movie).

And, really, the first three movies are all variants on the same basic structure. This one does manage to do something new.

This is the second summer-movie blockbuster in two weeks to revolve around time travel (Star Trek being the other). Without giving spoilers, I think it is arguable that the time travel here doesn’t seem to quite work the way it does in the other movies; but that’s part of the fun of time travel movies; drawing diagrams on a beer-soaked napkin and arguing about what would and wouldn’t work with a completely impossible thing.

Apparently this is going to be a trilogy of movies with Christian Bale. So he’ll be back. And he’ll be back…again.

He learns that many of the figures are being put into storage in Washington to make way for hologram exhibits. So he goes to say goodbye to his pals. But that darn monkey steals the tablet, and so, everything comes alive in the Smithsonian.

Now Larry has to go to the Smithsonian to fix things. But an Evil Egyptian Pharoah (Hank Azaria) has come alive and wants to take over the world.

Yes, this is pretty much the same movie in a new museum, but it’s a cooler museum, America’s Attic. It’s a kid’s movie, but a pretty good one. Museums are cool, and spooky, and there’s probably not a night watchmen in any museum who hasn’t paced the halls at night, wondering, what if all this stuff started moving?

Amy Adams really steals the show as Amelia Earhart. She’s so spunky there should be, and probably is, an Action Figure. It’ll be interesting to compare her Amelia Earhart with Hilary Swank’s in October when the movie Amelia comes out.

Now, if I found myself speaking to Amelia Earhart, there’s probably a question I’d want to ask of her: What the heck happened to you? But, since these museum figures, despite their preternatural animation and sentience, only know what history knows (they’re not the “real thing”), maybe that’s why Larry never pops that question.

One cool addition in this is the Modern Art sculptures coming alive. Also, paintings and pictures come alive, Harry Potter-style. Not sure what Edward Hopper’s NIGHTHAWKS is doing in the Smithsonian rather than the Art Institute of Chicago, but there it is.

I note for the record that a pretty scary horror movie could be made on this same concept – especially the idea of trapped sentience in the inanimate made animate. But, this is not that movie!

This version of Star Trek comes from director J.J. Abrams of “Lost” fame.  Don’t worry, no smoke monster here.   What he does do is bring a much needed reboot to the Star Trek franchise that I would liken to what happened to the Batman franchise starting with Batman Begins.   Basically he threw out all preconceived notions of the franchiase and make a movie for today’s audience.   He does stay true to the characters for the most part, they are all quite recognizable with their trademark quotes, etc.   And the NCC 1701, the original Enterprise looks as you would expect, so nothing too radical there, but he does not limit himself to the known history of the existing franchise.

So what you end up with here is the original crew in their youth as they assume their roles on the Enterprise, but you also get a solid reboot of the whole franchise.   All of the new actors give great nods to their predecessors, playing off of some of their stereotypes and catch phrases.   They have a little fun with it and go tongue in cheek but stop well short of being campy.    I was worried about some of the casting.   I mean, I have to admit there were times that I was expecting to see John Cho (from Harold and Kumar) as Sulu plot a course for White Castle.   But it worked surprisingly well, I didn’t even hear ticking whenever I would see Sylar as Spock after a while.

This would be an easy movie to spoil.   I think you’ll enjoy it most by going in not really knowing much about what to expect and just sit back and enjoy it, so I’m not going to go into the storyline much.   What I will tell you is to expect a lot of absolutely killer effects, stunts, fighting and good old fashioned space battles.

We’ll bottom line it for you.   5 stars.   Go see it, then buy it on Blu-ray as soon as it’s out.   I don’t care whether you are a previous fan or a hardcore trekkie fanboy, if you love SciFi movies, I cant see how you could possibly not have a blast watching this movie.