Sherlock Holmes

2009 action movie/bastardized lit

Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 11/20)

Plot: Slobbish detective Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson attempt to solve the mystery of who is trying to terrorize Londoners. Turns out that it's a dead guy! Oh, snap!

The more this went on (and on and on), the more I actually ended up liking it. Unfortunately, it was never enough to completely save the movie. This is one of those movies that seems like it was written by eight different people. They all started out in same conference room around a massive oval table, a picture of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in front of an empty chair to give them inspiration. Maybe they all smoked opium, listened to violin music, and wore deerstalker hats to get in the right mood. In fact, I'm sure they all must have been smoking opium. They had trouble agreeing on much, just as you'd expect from a gaggle of writers, and decided to split up, write portions of the plot on their own, and reassemble later to paste it all together. So Guy #1 ran off with his head full of all these supernatural elements because he digs vampire movies; Guy #2, the traditionalist of the bunch, left with his convoluted explanations to show off Holmes' deductive knack and powers of observation; Guy #3, lover of action movies that he was, decided to storyboard a few ultra-modern fight scenes; Guy #4, lover of romantic comedies that he was, figured a little romance on the side wouldn't hurt anything; Guy #5 figured it was about time to put all that research he'd done on Masonry back in graduate school to use, also remembering the popularity of that Da Vinci Code movie; Guy #6, awakened from yet another terrorism-fueled nightmare, decided to put his irrational fears to use and include biological weapons; Guy #7 had writer's block and failed to contribute anything at all; and Guy #8, a chemist without any friends at all, decided to Bill-Nye-the-Science-Guy is up and add a bunch of stuff that nobody but he and the friends he would have had if he had had any would understand. They reconvened and threw all their ideas on that big oval table. But some dastardly foe, likely from a rival movie studio although that's yet to be proven, set the table on fire! The writers panicked, rapidly assembling the most coherent story they possibly can before their hard work perished in the flames. Sure the final result was a complete mess, but they decided that modern audiences won't mind if there's some nifty special effects to go along with it. I was a little annoyed by the slow-mo modern fisticuffs and Guy Ritchie's flashy direction. It's all stylistically interesting but very distracting. The story was also frustratingly complex, and after a while, I was so confused that I just gave up trying to figure out what was going on. Yes, it does all come together in the end, but it wasn't enough to make up for the previous 110 minutes of frustration. I don't easily forgive when something or somebody makes me feel so stupid for so long. The special effects team did create some cool settings (love moody London here), and as readers of my blog know, I always like Robert Downey Jr. He and Jude Law have fine chemistry. Rachel McAdams also provides some eye candy. I suppose there are enough nods to the original source material to appease some Holmes-aphiles while the purists will likely turn up their noses and pooh-pooh the whole thing. I'm somewhat in the middle. I'm not in a hurry to see this again even though it's the type of thing that repeated viewing could help, but I wouldn't mind renting the sequel when it comes out.

True Grit

2010 Western

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 19/20)

Plot: The guy in that one Coen Brothers' movie killed another guy, one we never see but who was more than likely in at least one Coen Brothers' movie. His daughter wants vengeance. She wants it bad! So she finds a tough guy with an eyepatch, the guy who was in that one Coen Brothers' movie, and hires him to take care of business. A guy who has never been in a Coen Brothers' movie but who was in another movie with a guy who was in a Coen Brothers' movie tags along because he's been looking for the guy who was in the one Coen Brothers' movie for a very long time. A guy who looks like a bear shows up later.

Nice traditional, old-school Wild West action here, shaded with the Brothers' dark humor, offbeat characters, and stylized ultraviolence. Cause nobody just gets stabbed in the chest or shot in the head in a Coen Brothers' movie. They create big moments whenever their characters get theirs, moments that are oft-graphic, sometimes blackly humorous, and almost always thrilling. There's almost a coldness to their death scenes, and the poor characters pass to the next world without dignity. That's not a criticism, by the way. And the next worlds that most of these characters will inhabit probably aren't going to be a very nice one, like where the Care Bears live. No, most of these characters are going to end up in some dusty purgatory where their scars will itch. Being a Coen Brothers' movie, there are certain things you can just expect walking in: a great meaty script with lots of humorous things for the characters to say, stunning visual storytelling, and a few moments you'll want to talk about later. You know, like guys being shoved into wood chippers. And you get all that, as well as some terrific character acting. Mattie's played by somebody named Hailee Steinfeld, and although she's good, this really isn't her movie. This belongs to Lebowski, and every word he speaks is drenched in tobacco juice and whiskey and broken glass and filth. Bridges' Rooster is that type of character who is very funny without making any effort at all to be funny. You have to love Bridges' versatility. Matt Damon and Josh Brolin are also good, and the rest of the supporting cast, sometimes only on the screen for a few odd moments, help color in the Coens' askew vision of the Wild West. What I didn't expect walking into a Coen Brothers' movie: a heavy-handed Hollywoody score (I'll have to hear it again actually; Jen says it's a nod to the classics of the genre, and I think it could help with the myth making.) and such a traditional, simple story. The latter was no problem. What bugged me was the end where simple was thrown out of the saloon to make way for a goofy and unlikely denouement where a few too many things happen. As with all Coen Brothers' movies, I look forward to seeing this again.

Jen and I made a rare trip to the theater to see this one. We saw previews for a movie that must be based on the old Rockin' Robots toy and a movie about Neil Armstrong finding Transformers on the moon. Jen leaned over during both and (too loudly) said, "I am all over that! Booyah!"

Meet Me in St. Louis

1944 piece of technicolor crap

Rating: 10/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: Attorney Smith lives in St. Louis with his wife and four daughters, one of them who might be the devil. They spend most of their time singing and being carefree, but suddenly, Dad announces that they're going to move to New York City. Oh, snap! This depresses everybody!

Judy Garland is sort of homely and has a terrible voice. Shirley Temple should have played Esther in this movie. There really isn't enough story here to make an entire movie which is why, I guess, they have to stuff in a bunch of songs. This might have been the most excruciating movie experience of the year for me, mostly because of the disturbing and obnoxious performance of child actress Margaret O'Brien as "Tootie," the only character I've watched this year with this almost overwhelming desire to hit repeatedly with a shovel. Seriously, what the hell is going on with Tootie? She's psychologically disturbed! The Halloween scene in which she's burning furniture and throwing flour in people's faces for no good reason is bad enough, but when she talks openly about trying to murder people? Yikes! If I would have watched this movie seventeen years ago, this kid would have inspired me to castrate myself so that I wouldn't accidentally have children. In addition to children, this movie also made me hate the following:

--Music

--St. Louis, a city I've always loved

--Fairs

--Love

--Color

--The Wizard of Oz

--Frills

--My wife

--Snowmen

--Christmas

--Halloween

--Trolleys

--White people

--Square dancing

--Alec Baldwin

--1903

--America

--The Facts of Life

It's been a couple days, but Meet Me in St. Louis seems to have this ability to continue making me suffer long after it's ended. It's like a bad taste in my soul. How this movie didn't lead to murder-suicide must be some kind of Christmas miracle.

Kill it with a shovel:

Amelia

2009 biopic

Rating: 9/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: Details the misadventures of the notoriously lousy pilot Amelia Earhart.

That poster almost makes me throw up. So did Hillary Swank's relentless smile in this movie. I'm not sure if Amelia Earhart is known historically for having a smile that made her appear as if she was about to bite your head off, but that's about the only thing I learned about Earhart in this movie. Well, that and the fact that she was such a whore. I didn't know that. Maybe it's because I have the mentality of your typical middle schooler, but I can't watch a Richard Gere movie without thinking of gerbils or Ewan McGregor without thinking of Ewan McGregor's junk. And now, I guess because of a guilt-by-association thing, I won't be able to watch a Hillary Swank movie without thinking about gerbils or Ewan McGregor's junk. And those would be just reasons number two and three for why I'd rather not watch another Hillary Swank movie. In Amelia, like in her other movies, she's Acting with that capital A, sinking her giant teeth into a role that's got Academy Award written all over it. Only she's not a great actress, and she makes Amelia Earhart seem like one of the most irritating women in history, a character I hoped to see eaten by cannibals (or Michael Oher) by the end of the movie. Eerily melodramatic and sickeningly sentimental, almost every aspect of this movie seems unnecessary. I would much rather just read a book about Amelia Earhart, and I don't even like reading.

The Blind Side

2009 big-screen after-school special

Rating: 11/20 (Jen: 15/20; Emma: 15/20; Abbey: 18/20)

Plot: The extraordinary true story of Michael Oher, a troubled black teen without a home or family who is transformed overnight into a student-athlete after the well-to-do Touly family takes him in and feeds him turkey.

Somebody made Dylan watch this at school, and he told me, after his class had almost finished the entire thing, that it was a great movie, one that he would rate an 18. That's three times what he rated Dr. Strangelove, by the way. So we watched it, actually finishing the movie before he got a chance to watch the rest. I told him he was going to feel let down by the ending because Oher ends up devouring the Touly son S.J. Sandra Bullock walks in and watches in horror as Oher gnaws the rest of S.J.'s flesh from what appears to be a bloody, tooth-marked femur, and screams, "Big Mike! What are you doing?" Oher looks at her with this demented look in his eyes, a string of cartilage dangling from his lips, and exclaims with a mouth full of S.J., "I told you not to call me Big Mike!" That would have made this a much, much better movie, but a much, much less extraordinary true story. Speaking of S.J., I don't see how anybody can watch Jae Head's performance, a slightly-more-obnoxious-than-normal child performance, and consider this as a Best Picture nominee. His first line ("It's girl's volleyball, mom. You didn't miss anything.") almost made me stop watching The Blind Side. Sandra Bullock's critically-acclaimed performance isn't much better though. I wasn't as impressed with her down-home accent and tough-cookie personality as most seemed to be. It seemed to me that she had only a single move that she used over and over in this movie--a sideways glance with slightly-parted lips that she'd use whenever another character in the movie said anything to her. It kind of made her character seem dumb a lot of the time. This alternates between bland, derivative, and overly sentimental, and although the story is a nice one, I don't get the hype. It's definitely not three times better than Dr. Strangelove.

Babies

2010 documentary

Rating: 11/20 (Jen: 20/20; Dylan: 4/20; Emma: 18/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: A seemingly endless juxtaposition of home video footage of babies from Nambia, Japan, Mongolia, and America during the first year of their lives.

A baby who isn't yours is nothing more than an obnoxious flabby burdensome stupid thing who, according to my father, looks like a shrunken Winston Churchill. And to be completely honest, I'm not sure I would want to watch ninety minutes of home videos featuring my own children as babies, let alone these babies I've got no connection with at all. Purportedly, this is all about how different cultures raise their children, but there's very little focus, just pointless and annoyingly precious scenes strung together haphazardly and given a title that a baby might have been able to come up with. And despite the cultural differences, some subtle and some extreme, we all know that it's all going to end the same with the annoying babies eventually becoming dangerous adults. So even though it's all shot very well, it's really as pointless and trite as documentary filmmaking gets. I would rather change a crappy diaper than watch this one again, but it's the exact sort of thing that some people would find delightful. For whatever reason, I want to blame Oprah for this.

No Impact Man: The Documentary

2009 documentary

Rating: 12/20 (Jen: 16/20)

Plot: Colin Beamer (That's not his name, and I'm too lazy to look up his name. That's OK though because now when he Googles himself [it's likely that he frequently does], he won't get to my blog and have his feelings hurt by my comments on what is essentially an advertisement for himself.) decides to live one year without refrigerators, toilet paper, electricity, or anything else that makes an impact on our environment.

Colin Blorpin didn't direct this movie about himself, but I have no doubt that he rounded up the posse to have it made. I'm sure he really cares about the environment and hopes that his experiment will motivate others to do something. He nudges up against some good things here--buying locally and seasonally, knowing where your food is coming from, eliminating the amount we waste as Americans--but there's not nearly enough details about the hows and whys. So No Impact Man fails to make much of an impact at all, and it seems like less of an informational piece than a big publicity stunt. Which, I suppose, makes it effective. I now know all about the Bathworth family, especially about how much he wants to sell books.

Jen added this to the list during my streak of "man" movies, a streak which, by the way, might have just as much of an impact on the environment as this movie.

Note: I might just be in a terrible mood and taking it all out on this movie and this poor guy who might be completely genuine and who I am judging unfairly. I apologize to Colin Blipper if that's the case.

Food, Inc.

2008 horror movie

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 19/20)

Plot: Troubling expose about how food production has changed. It's not good. Essentially, we're all going to die if we keep eating.

Scary stuff, people. There's not much that was really revolutionary here. Animals are being maltreated. A handful of corporations run everything. Corn is used too often. We eat things that are unfit for animals. The meat we eat is filled with hormones and fecal matter. The government doesn't really care about us. Corporations try to mislead consumers or keep them in the dark about what is in the food they eat. A waterfall of chickens, no matter what anybody else says, is really kind of funny. They're mostly lessons already learned and this is a ton of information to try to digest. It's a ninety minutes bursting at the seams, like the typical American threatening to break apart the fragile fabric of his action pants. It's presented very well, however, and the documentary is as entertaining as it is informative. Similarly to Al Gore's horror movie about how we're all going to drown (same producers actually), this spits out the problems but left me pessimistic. There was a flashy little list of tips before the credits, but most of the solution to our food production problems can't be solved by the average Joe Blow. And this particular Joe Blow is way too lazy to really do anything about all of this anyway.

I believe this was recommended by Oprah. I wouldn't want to eat her either.