Stars Ty gives **1/2
Title: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Directed by Stephen Sommers
Starring
Channing Tatum
Marlon Wayans
Sienna Miller
Rachel Nichols
Dennis Quaid
Release date August 7th 2009
This movie is every boys wet dream . This movie has action, explosions, and a contempt for France, since a lot of the action and explosions involve blowing up the streets of Paris and destroying the French's much loved Eiffel Tower. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the wet part. This movie also has hot babes clad in leather, battle suits with low, unzipped zippers, and high heels who kick butt with their martial art skills, shoot guns that never miss, and jump out of helicopters. Pretty cool. And of course they're nice to look at. I do appreciate the guys too. Channing Tatum (Step Up as Tyler Gage and She's the Man as Duke for you girls, and Coach Carter as Jason Lyle and Fighting as Shawn MacArthur for you guys) plays... well, a guy named Duke and is pretty much a rock star who knows it without trying to show it. He's a good guy. An all-American hero. He's the perfect G.I. Joe. He also has a good buddy who is his side kick, equal, and friend played by Marlon Wayans (The Sixth Man as Kenny Tyler and White Chicks as Marcus Copeland) who plays Ripcord. The girls, otherwise known as Sienna Miller (Nikki in Alfie, Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl, Victoria in Stardust) plays the bad girl clad in black, known as The Baroness, and Rachel Nichols (Rachel Gibson on Alias, Jessica in Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry met Lloyd, and Galia, the green skinned alien on Star Trek. OMG WTF!) plays the fiery red headed Shanna 'Scarlett' O'Hara. Haha. Oh, and there's Dennis Quaid (If you don't know who Dennis Quaid is, fail. Look him up on Google.). He's the man in charge and well, they really didn't need to hire someone like Dennis Quaid for the role of General Hawk. So we have an alright cast. Great.
So how is the plot? It's pretty decent. Pretty complicated. Too complicated to write about but if you were a fan of the cartoon G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero or the G.I. Joe comics, both of which I wasn't allowed to watch or read when I was a kid, then you probably know a lot more about G.I. Joe than I did. I was more of a Transformers kid. Anyways, the plots alright and pretty easy to follow. A couple of twists and turns and a whole lot of back story. That's pretty neat.
So how are the special effects? Well good And bad. Some special effects are great. The scenes were they're shooting people, destroying buildings, jumping over and running through trains, and a Humvee that flips cars through the air are pretty amazing. Other scenes such as the ships that go through the water in the Arctic, the green stuff that explodes out of the warheads and eats its way across anything metal, and the grey metal thing that comes out of the Humvee that flips the cars and folds out like something out of Transformers yet looks like its made out of cardboard are way cheesy. It's like they forgot to finish these scenes or simply put too much time and money on the good stunts and not enough on the others.
So lets talk about some things I was puzzled by. One. Jonathan Price (Gov. Weatherby Swan in Pirates of the Caribbean 1,2, and 3) plays the American president. The filmmakers know he's British right? Welsh actually, and he sounds exactly the same from the Pirates trilogy. Two. Joseph Gordon-Lewitt (Angels in the Outfield as Rodger Bomman, 10 Things I hate about you as Cameron James, and Brick as Brenen Frye) has come a long way and has a rather impressive acting career, happens to be in the critically acclaimed film 500 Days of Summer this year, yet chooses to be the baby faced kid brother Rex in this movie? He's a year younger than Channing Tatum and happens to be older than Sienna Miller by a few months and yet he's playing the little brother? Just because you look young, does not mean you need to act young. 3. Cameos of people are supposed to be clever and funny. Stephen Sommers who not only directed this movie but was made famous for directing The Mummy and The Mummy Returns had Brendan Fraser cameo in this movie. Makes sense since Brendan Fraser plays Rick O'Connell in those movies, except that they probably spent less than thirty seconds on this cameo and from what I could tell when watching the movie they barely or didn't even introduce who he was. FAIL. A good example of a cameo is Arnold Vosloo (High priest Imhotep in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns) as Zartan whose cameo shows him in one scene as the guy walking a camel through the Egyptian desert at night. Now that's LMAO funny. Then there's Kevin J. O'Conner who like Helena Bonham Carter with Tim Burton, seems to cameo in almost everything directed by Stephen Sommers. The Stephen Sommers movies he's been in so far are Deep Rising as Joey Pantucci, The Mummy as Beni Gabor, Van Helsing as Igor, and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra as Dr. Mindbender. He's kind of creepy, like Helena Bonham Carter, so I guess that works.
So is this movie worth your $7,00, $8,00, $9,00 dollars to go see? No. Is it worth a dollar or a free coupon out of Redbox machine? Maybe. To sum up, this movie is nothing but hot individuals running around a computer generated world doing things we wish the actual military could do. The end. Like I said in the beginning. Every little boys wet dream.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
The Brave One
Stars Ty gives ***1/2
Title: The Brave One
Directed by Neil Jordan
Staring
Jodie Foster
Terrence Howard
Naveen Andrews
Nicky Katt
Release date September 14th 2007
This is a dramatic film about revenge. This movie is about a woman who was beaten along side her fiancee while they were out walking their dog at night in a park. She recovers, slowly, in the hospital. He does not. She simply tries to go on living. She's coping. She's trying to overcome her fear by walking out the front door of her apartment without being afraid. She's trying to get her mind off things and get her mind back on work. She's trying to be patient and understand that the NYPD are on her side and trying to help her. But it's a big city, and her case is cold. Her case is old and their are no witnesses. So, she goes and buys a gun. Well, she tries. New York isn't like Kansas. In New York, they have strict laws about guns and licenses. She doesn't want to wait. She gets a gun illegally and carries it in her purse like mace along with her lip gloss. It's there just in case. Just in case of what? This film asks the viewer a lot of questions. The film asks, "What would you do?" What would you do if you were in the back of a convenient store, picking out which soda you want when someone barges in, screaming, pulls out a gun and shoots the girl behind the counter in the chest over and over. You stand there, quietly, and in shock. Your cell rings. He hears you. He still has a gun and it still has bullets in it. He's alert. He's wide eyed. He knows your in there, somewhere. He comes looking for you. He slowly walks down the isle towards you. You have a gun. It's loaded. You've never shot a gun before in your life, let alone at a human being. What would you do? If you don't grab that gun and turn off the safety, soon, he is going to find you. You have only moments. If he even thinks that you are somewhere in his vicinity, he will shoot at you. His bullets will most likely hit you and kill you. He just murdered a girl in cold blood. Nothing is going to stop him from murdering you. Now is your chance. He doesn't see you, but you see him. You are directly across from him. The gun is in your hand. It's pointed at him. He still doesn't see you. All you have to do, is squeeze the trigger.
As for the more specific things about this movie like the acting or the story, the movie is intriguing. Jodie Foster (Silence of the lambs as Clarice Starling, Panic Room as Meg Altman, Inside Man as Madeleine White) as Erica Bain is and always will be a great actress, even though she kind of looks like a teenage boy in this movie. Terrence Howard (Iron Man as Col. James Rhodes aka Rhody, August Rush as Richard Jeffries, Idlewild as Trumpy) as Detective Mercer in my opinion is always better as a good guy than he is a bad guy, and Naveen Andrews (Sayid Jarrah on Lost) as David Kirmani is a interesting and unlikely candidate for a love interest. This film shows that racism and stereotyping doesn't apply to everyone. But for some it does. For some people, there is no difference between white and Indian, and black people aren't always gangsters holding guns and knives, mugging people on the subway. People from India aren't always terrorists. Sometimes, they're just some guy on street about to get married. But, some black people are out to mug, rape, and kill. But this movie clearly shows that a black person can kill, a latino can kill, a white collar male can kill, and a blonde white woman can kill too. This movie is not Kill Bill, though their are elements of that here. She was about to be married. She lost her fiance when he was brutally killed and she could not stop it. This movie also has elements of Death Sentence which coincidentally enough was released exactly two weeks before this movie, which is about a white collar male whose son is slaughtered during a gang initiation before his very eyes. He wants justice which he doesn't get, so he buys a gun and goes on a killing spree. The problem with that movie is that during his killing spree, he loses his wife and almost loses his other son to the gang that killed his pride and joy and gives himself a death sentence by finishing what he started, even though his youngest son will live to see another day as an orphan. Epic fail. Also, Kevin Bacon is not a bad @ss. Jodie Foster, on the hand is. Should you then watch this movie? It's pretty good. Hollywoodized of course. (If you don't know what Hollywoodized means, in a cop movie it means the cop always figures out the case in the end, even though in real life he would never act that way and never have a chance of figuring out what happened.) It's not overly gory and the language isn't bad. She doesn't get raped, so that is a plus. The ending is what gets me. It's not what I wanted even though part of me thinks I wanted that, but deep down I didn't want the movie to end the way it ended. I think if I was younger or less mature, I'd like the ending, but as a good friend of mine once said to me, "I'm older. I know where I stand. I can figure out what's right and what's wrong, and I can stand behind that." I think if you're a strong Christian or at least a highly mature person, you won't like this ending either. The ending to this film might have given the public what they wanted, but not necessarily what they needed. People are smart enough to pick out what they think is right. Hollywood is not.
Title: The Brave One
Directed by Neil Jordan
Staring
Jodie Foster
Terrence Howard
Naveen Andrews
Nicky Katt
Release date September 14th 2007
This is a dramatic film about revenge. This movie is about a woman who was beaten along side her fiancee while they were out walking their dog at night in a park. She recovers, slowly, in the hospital. He does not. She simply tries to go on living. She's coping. She's trying to overcome her fear by walking out the front door of her apartment without being afraid. She's trying to get her mind off things and get her mind back on work. She's trying to be patient and understand that the NYPD are on her side and trying to help her. But it's a big city, and her case is cold. Her case is old and their are no witnesses. So, she goes and buys a gun. Well, she tries. New York isn't like Kansas. In New York, they have strict laws about guns and licenses. She doesn't want to wait. She gets a gun illegally and carries it in her purse like mace along with her lip gloss. It's there just in case. Just in case of what? This film asks the viewer a lot of questions. The film asks, "What would you do?" What would you do if you were in the back of a convenient store, picking out which soda you want when someone barges in, screaming, pulls out a gun and shoots the girl behind the counter in the chest over and over. You stand there, quietly, and in shock. Your cell rings. He hears you. He still has a gun and it still has bullets in it. He's alert. He's wide eyed. He knows your in there, somewhere. He comes looking for you. He slowly walks down the isle towards you. You have a gun. It's loaded. You've never shot a gun before in your life, let alone at a human being. What would you do? If you don't grab that gun and turn off the safety, soon, he is going to find you. You have only moments. If he even thinks that you are somewhere in his vicinity, he will shoot at you. His bullets will most likely hit you and kill you. He just murdered a girl in cold blood. Nothing is going to stop him from murdering you. Now is your chance. He doesn't see you, but you see him. You are directly across from him. The gun is in your hand. It's pointed at him. He still doesn't see you. All you have to do, is squeeze the trigger.
As for the more specific things about this movie like the acting or the story, the movie is intriguing. Jodie Foster (Silence of the lambs as Clarice Starling, Panic Room as Meg Altman, Inside Man as Madeleine White) as Erica Bain is and always will be a great actress, even though she kind of looks like a teenage boy in this movie. Terrence Howard (Iron Man as Col. James Rhodes aka Rhody, August Rush as Richard Jeffries, Idlewild as Trumpy) as Detective Mercer in my opinion is always better as a good guy than he is a bad guy, and Naveen Andrews (Sayid Jarrah on Lost) as David Kirmani is a interesting and unlikely candidate for a love interest. This film shows that racism and stereotyping doesn't apply to everyone. But for some it does. For some people, there is no difference between white and Indian, and black people aren't always gangsters holding guns and knives, mugging people on the subway. People from India aren't always terrorists. Sometimes, they're just some guy on street about to get married. But, some black people are out to mug, rape, and kill. But this movie clearly shows that a black person can kill, a latino can kill, a white collar male can kill, and a blonde white woman can kill too. This movie is not Kill Bill, though their are elements of that here. She was about to be married. She lost her fiance when he was brutally killed and she could not stop it. This movie also has elements of Death Sentence which coincidentally enough was released exactly two weeks before this movie, which is about a white collar male whose son is slaughtered during a gang initiation before his very eyes. He wants justice which he doesn't get, so he buys a gun and goes on a killing spree. The problem with that movie is that during his killing spree, he loses his wife and almost loses his other son to the gang that killed his pride and joy and gives himself a death sentence by finishing what he started, even though his youngest son will live to see another day as an orphan. Epic fail. Also, Kevin Bacon is not a bad @ss. Jodie Foster, on the hand is. Should you then watch this movie? It's pretty good. Hollywoodized of course. (If you don't know what Hollywoodized means, in a cop movie it means the cop always figures out the case in the end, even though in real life he would never act that way and never have a chance of figuring out what happened.) It's not overly gory and the language isn't bad. She doesn't get raped, so that is a plus. The ending is what gets me. It's not what I wanted even though part of me thinks I wanted that, but deep down I didn't want the movie to end the way it ended. I think if I was younger or less mature, I'd like the ending, but as a good friend of mine once said to me, "I'm older. I know where I stand. I can figure out what's right and what's wrong, and I can stand behind that." I think if you're a strong Christian or at least a highly mature person, you won't like this ending either. The ending to this film might have given the public what they wanted, but not necessarily what they needed. People are smart enough to pick out what they think is right. Hollywood is not.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Terminator Salvation
Stars Ty gives * * *
Title: Terminator Salvation
Directed by McG
Staring
Christian Bale
Sam Worthington
Anton Yelchin
Moon Bloodgood
Fourth film in the Terminator franchise
Released date May 21st 2009
So, how good was this movie? It was alright. Is it as good as Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day or Terminator 3: Rise of the machines? Well it's not as good as Terminator one or two and anything is better than Terminator 3. No offense Kristanna Loken. You're still hot, but your movie isn't very good. Did I think it followed the storyline when it comes to the other three films? Well since they didn't use much of the past in this film and focused only on the present, there wasn't much fault. Christian Bale (Batman Begins and The Dark Knight as Bruce Wayne) who plays John Connor thinks he's a bad @ss. Sam Worthington who plays Marcus Wright is a tough guy as well. Moon Bloodgood who plays Blair Williams seems more of an actual tough guy then both of them put together. Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village as Ivy Walker, Lady in the Water as Story) who plays Kate Connor was wasted in this movie. Helena Bonham Carter (Fight Club as Marla Singer, and the past five soon to be six films directed by her lover/life partner/father of her child Tim Burton) who plays Dr. Serena Kogan has a cameo that was a little weird, and not in a cool way. Is she trying to crossover into movies not directed by Tim Burton? Cause, it's not really her cup of tea. Try cameoing in one of David Fincher's films. I'd pay to see that. (David Fincher, director of Fight Club) Anton Yelchin (Star Trek as Pavel Chekov) was cool, running around shooting anything that moved. Jadagrace who plays Star, the youngest one in the cast was probably the best actor in this movie and she didn't even have any lines. Just like Devon Aoki who played Miho in Sin City. Both girls were pivotal and memorable. So how were the special effects? For those of you who all you care about is special effects, they were pretty cool, and massive. But special effects do not make a movie. Just look at The Matrix Revolutions. So was this movie confusing? It wasn't for me, but I've seen all three Terminator movies and watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which in my opinion, the first season was better than this movie, but that's just me. If you liked it, cool. If you liked it and thought it was confusing because you haven't watched the others or haven't seen one and two in a long time, watch one and two. Not three. Fail. If you didn't like this movie because it wasn't your cup of tea, than watch something else. Don't give up on sci-fi though. Watch Star Trek instead.
Title: Terminator Salvation
Directed by McG
Staring
Christian Bale
Sam Worthington
Anton Yelchin
Moon Bloodgood
Fourth film in the Terminator franchise
Released date May 21st 2009
So, how good was this movie? It was alright. Is it as good as Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day or Terminator 3: Rise of the machines? Well it's not as good as Terminator one or two and anything is better than Terminator 3. No offense Kristanna Loken. You're still hot, but your movie isn't very good. Did I think it followed the storyline when it comes to the other three films? Well since they didn't use much of the past in this film and focused only on the present, there wasn't much fault. Christian Bale (Batman Begins and The Dark Knight as Bruce Wayne) who plays John Connor thinks he's a bad @ss. Sam Worthington who plays Marcus Wright is a tough guy as well. Moon Bloodgood who plays Blair Williams seems more of an actual tough guy then both of them put together. Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village as Ivy Walker, Lady in the Water as Story) who plays Kate Connor was wasted in this movie. Helena Bonham Carter (Fight Club as Marla Singer, and the past five soon to be six films directed by her lover/life partner/father of her child Tim Burton) who plays Dr. Serena Kogan has a cameo that was a little weird, and not in a cool way. Is she trying to crossover into movies not directed by Tim Burton? Cause, it's not really her cup of tea. Try cameoing in one of David Fincher's films. I'd pay to see that. (David Fincher, director of Fight Club) Anton Yelchin (Star Trek as Pavel Chekov) was cool, running around shooting anything that moved. Jadagrace who plays Star, the youngest one in the cast was probably the best actor in this movie and she didn't even have any lines. Just like Devon Aoki who played Miho in Sin City. Both girls were pivotal and memorable. So how were the special effects? For those of you who all you care about is special effects, they were pretty cool, and massive. But special effects do not make a movie. Just look at The Matrix Revolutions. So was this movie confusing? It wasn't for me, but I've seen all three Terminator movies and watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which in my opinion, the first season was better than this movie, but that's just me. If you liked it, cool. If you liked it and thought it was confusing because you haven't watched the others or haven't seen one and two in a long time, watch one and two. Not three. Fail. If you didn't like this movie because it wasn't your cup of tea, than watch something else. Don't give up on sci-fi though. Watch Star Trek instead.
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