PCP on DVD - 12 supershort reviews

Ok so my wife pointed out to me that my backlog will never get cleared out unless I really clear them out en masse.  She also pointed out that I should focus more on the newer releases on DVD, instead of the older stuff that we caught on DVD.  So, I’m going to wipe out my entire backlog of everything that is from 2009 or older in one fell swoop, with super short reviews- twitter sized reviews basically.  So here’s my quick thoughts on 12 films from 2009 or older that for some reason or another we watched on DVD within the past couple months.

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant.  My rating:  6 out of 10.  It’s ok, not great.  Hayek and Reilly are entertaining, but the movie is only average.

Planet 51.  My rating:  6 out of 10.  Cute but not great.  Decent kids movie, not as much there for the adults though.

The Joneses.  My rating:  7 out of 10.  Very interesting dark comedy with a disturbing and creepy premise.  Marketing majors would find this especially interesting.  Good social commentary on the consumer nation we live in.

Good Hair.  My rating:  7 out of 10.  Funny and interesting look into the world of hair, documentary made by Chris Rock.  You’ll never look at a weave the same way again.

Why Did I Get Married?  My rating:  6 out of 10.  Average film with a message from Tyler Perry.  Better than its sequel.

Surrogates.  My rating:  5 out of 10.  Promising premise, so-so execution.  It’s ok.  If you don’t like sci-fi take a pass.

The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.  My rating:  7 out of 10.  Rebecca De Mornay is great and chilling in this, very creepy.  A bit cheesy though, kind of shows its age a little bit (it is 20 years old now).

Carriers.  My rating:  4 out of 10.  I wouldn’t have watched this if it didn’t star Captain Kirk aka Chris Pine.  Even then though, not worth really watching.  Rather bleak and depressing, and not particularly good.

The Time Traveler’s Wife.  My rating:  7 out of 10.  Cute and sappy, guaranteed to make your wife cry.  Not a romantic comedy though, more like a romantic drama, which is more depressing.

Surf Ninjas.  My rating:  3 out of 10.  I wouldn’t have watched this if my wife didn’t force me to, as she loved it when she was a kid.  Terrible film, super cheesy.  I guess it would have been better if I had watched this back when it came out, when I was 12, but at 29 it is just weak.

Dahmer.  My rating:  5 out of 10.  Jeremy Renner is creepy as heck as serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.  Unfortunately the rest of the movie is only average.

Lilo & Stitch.  My rating:  8 out of 10.  Probably the best Disney non-Pixar film of the past 15 years.  Funny and heartwarming.  I’ll definitely be adding this to the collection of movies I’m buying for my soon to arrive child.

Ok so now the backlog is down to 39.  I’ll also be cranking out the 2010 films I’ve seen like this shortly, then I’ll go back to longer reviews on the films from 2011.  Thanks for stopping by!

PCP on DVD - Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy

Time for your next hit of PCP:  Pop Culture Panorama.  Due to circumstances beyond my control, I have developed about a 50 movie backlog of films to review, of films I’ve watched over the past couple months.  I’ve had enough time to watch the movies and jot down some observations, but not enough time until now to actually write the reviews.  So, I will be doing shorter than normal reviews of these films until I am caught back up, in convenient multi-packs of movies by genre.  Today I’m going to do things a little differently.  As the movies in this post are part of a trilogy, I will be discussing all 3 films in one large review.  The films are the Swedish adaptations of the bestselling Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson:  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest.  Also known as:  The books and movies with the obnoxiously long titles.  I have not read the books yet that these are based on, but I plan to at some point, and I’ll also be watching the American remakes of these when they come out, directed by David Fincher.  When I saw these, I watched the subtitled, not dubbed versions.  Now, on to the reviews:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 152 minutes.  My rating:  9 out of 10

The Girl Who Played With Fire 129 minutes.  My rating:  8 out of 10

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest 147 minutes.  My rating:  8 out of 10.

Starring:  Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre.  All are rated R, and all were released in 2009.  All are in Swedish with English subtitles. 

Reviews after the jump

PCP on TV - Lost Season 3 Better Late than Never!

Welcome back to Pop Culture Panorama.  Today I’ll be talking about the TV show Lost.  I never watched Lost when it was first on the air, and by the time I wanted to watch the show, all I heard about it was that it was confusing and if you were jumping in to it late, you would be totally… well, lost.  I knew this would be a show I’d like, because I love the work of J.J. Abrams, especially Fringe, and I love sci-fi in general.  So this summer I resolved to watch the entire run of the show on DVD.  I just completed power-discing through the third season now, and these are my thoughts and observations about this show. (WARNING:  mild spoilers ahead if you’re like me and never saw the show before).

• So the Others have a whole community with a small village and everything?  WTF?  That was quite the shocking opener to the 3^rd season.
• Again with the cliffhangers each week.  We don’t find out until the 3^rd episode of the season what happened when Desmond threw the failsafe in the hatch, and whether or not he, Locke, and Eko survived, and that was one of the main cliffhangers from the 2^nd season finale.  Colleen gets shot by Sun in the 2^nd episode, but whether or not she survives isn’t resolved until the 4^th episode of the season when she dies.  Also, one of the biggest cliffhangers from the 2^nd season finale – the ship that detected the magnetic burst from the island then reported back to Penny wasn’t seen again until late in the season, but then we find out that the ship we think was Penny’s ship wasn’t actually Penny’s ship.  It’s almost as if the writers forgot about that as it took almost the whole season to get to that.
• Did Sun’s lover jump to his death or was he thrown to his death?  I’m thinking thrown – as he had that necklace in his hand as he died.
• I liked how they teased us with Desmond seeing the future in the 3^rd episode and 4^th episode before explaining it more clearly later in the 8^th episode.  They didn’t explain until even later (the 17^th episode) how it is that Desmond seemingly can see multiple futures – each time he prevents Charlie’s death, he now has the knowledge of how to prevent the next one, because he gets a vision.

The rest of my thoughts are after the jump.  There's a lot for this season!

PCP on DVD - 3 Comicbook Adaptations reviewed

Time for your next hit of PCP:  Pop Culture Panorama.  Due to circumstances beyond my control, I have developed about a 50 movie backlog of films to review, of films I’ve watched over the past couple months.  I’ve had enough time to watch the movies and jot down some observations, but not enough time until now to actually write the reviews.  So, I will be doing shorter than normal reviews of these films until I am caught back up, in convenient multi-packs of movies by genre.  Today I’m going to do reviews for 3 films that were previously done as graphic novels:  Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; Red; & Kick-Ass.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – 2010; PG-13.  112 minutes.  Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, & Jason Schwartzman.  My rating:  8 out of 10.

I absolutely loved this movie.  Pilgrim is filmed as though it is a hybrid of a live movie, cartoon, video game, and comic all in one.  It is definitely one of the most unique and individualized films I’ve ever seen, as not a lot of movies are made like this.  It’s a true visual delight, starting right away with the Universal logo and music done as if it’s an old 8-bit video game.  Michael Cera stars as the titular Scott Pilgrim, playing a variant on the same character that he always plays, the kinda nerdy whiny guy, but this time he can actually rock with a band.  The movie has some great shout-outs to the world of comics and video games, including appearances by 3 actors that have starred as a Marvel or DC character in their own film:  Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, & Thomas Jane; as well as the music from Zelda and numerous other videogame homages.  The script from writer/director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) is filled with one liners and gag jokes.  The performances from the cast are all solid and very entertaining, especially some of the evil exes that Pilgrim has to fight.  I haven’t read the source material so I’m not sure how much it deviates from the graphic novels, but it’s a pretty entertaining film.  I’ll have to check out the books sometime.  All in all, this is a very enjoyable movie.  If you grew up on video games and comics, you’ll get a kick out of this film.

Read the other 2 reviews after the jump

PCP on TV - Lost Season 2 better late than never!

Welcome back to Pop Culture Panorama.  Today I’ll be talking about the TV show Lost.  I never watched Lost when it was first on the air, and by the time I wanted to watch the show, all I heard about it was that it was confusing and if you were jumping in to it late, you would be totally… well, lost.  I knew this would be a show I’d like, because I love the work of J.J. Abrams, especially Fringe, and I love sci-fi in general.  So this summer I resolved to watch the entire run of the show on DVD.  I just completed power-discing through the second season now, and these are my thoughts and observations about this show. (WARNING:  mild spoilers ahead if you’re like me and never saw the show before).

• I’m glad that I’m watching this on DVD, had I watched this one week at a time when it was live would have driven me nuts.  The 1^st episode of the season ends in a standoff that isn’t resolved until the 3^rd episode, and a shooting in the 6^th episode isn’t resolved until the 8^th.  Thank goodness I didn’t have to wait a week to find out what happened.  It seems every episode of this show ends on some sort of cliffhanger.
• The Dharma Initiative was founded by my fellow U of M alums.  Go Blue!
• I love how they link up characters – the guy that Jack allowed to die back when he was a doctor, having to choose between the two patients from the car crash, was Shannon’s dad and Boone’s step-dad.  Also, the character introduced in another of Jack’s flashbacks, Desmond, wound up being on the island as well.  He fled when the computer was shot in the hatch, but obviously nothing bad happened so I’d been kinda surprised so far that he didn’t come back for awhile.  They explain that when he does come back though, he’d been trying to flee the island.  And then in the season finale, we learn that Desmond had met Libby before their time on the island also.
• And then in Sayid’s flashback to his time in Iraq during the 1^st gulf war, he encountered Kate’s dad, as well as Kelvin, who was Desmond’s predecessor with pushing the button in the hatch.  And in Ana Lucia’s flashback to when she was working for Jack’s dad, they encounter Sawyer.

Read the rest of my musings after the jump

PCP in theaters - Transformers - Dark of the Moon

Time for another hit of PCP:  Pop Culture Panorama.  Today I’ll be reviewing Transformers:  Dark of the Moon, which I just caught in theaters.  For all the critical bashing this film received, I saw it Friday, 7/1 in a nearly sold out show, and people in the audience actually applauded when the film was done.

Transformers:  Dark of the Moon – 2011, Rated PG-13.  157 minutes.  Starring Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Patrick Dempsey, John Turturro, & John Malkovich, and the voices of Leonard Nimoy, Hugo Weaving, and Peter Cullen.  My rating:  8 out of 10 on the popcorn rating scale – movies that are popcorn movies are rated for how much fun they are, not for plot or acting.  They are films you can watch without having to think.  Leave your brain at the door.  Had this film been treated like an Oscar picture in my review, I’d probably give it 4 or 5 out of 10, as you’ll see why in the review.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of the Transformers characters in general.  I had a couple of their toys as a kid, watched the cartoon, and I actually enjoyed the first movie in this franchise quite a bit (though the second one had a number of obnoxious parts that ticked me off).  When I saw this movie, I was wearing a Transformers T-Shirt.  Also, I live in the Chicago area, and I’ve been to a bunch of the places where they filmed the movie and I love almost any movie set or filmed in Chicago, like Ferris Bueller or the Dark Knight.  On top of that, although he has become rather hated by many in film circles, I cannot forget that two action flicks I love, Bad Boys and The Rock, were Michael Bay’s first 2 directorial outings, so he has made a couple films that I thoroughly enjoyed before.  Altogether, I am not the most unbiased of reviewers of this film.  That being said, this is what I thought of it:

First off, the film is thankfully better than the 2^nd one in the series.  The first best improvement:  gone are the much hated racist stereotype “twins” from the second movie.  That doesn’t mean that Bay can make a movie without stereotypes.  He just replaces them with a Ferrari that speaks like a stereotypical Italian in the 1 line he has in the film, 3 Nascar cars that act like drunken hooligans and are even referred to by another character as a-holes, and one of the mini robots acts like a drugged homeless guy.  At least the other mini robot doesn’t do any leg humping this time.  The stereotypes aren’t limited to just the robots either, with Ken Jeong (Hangover 1 & 2) as an Asian stereotype and Alan Tudyk (Firefly) in this as a hodgepodge mix of stereotypes, as a form of comic relief.  Megan Fox has also been replaced in this movie by Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.  She isn’t a good actress, but she’s not in this role for her acting ability – as proven by the very first shot of her is of her walking up the stairs, from behind, in a dress shirt and tiny underwear but no pants.  Bay is making it extremely clear why she was cast in this film from the get-go.  Besides, in a film about robots, who cares if the actors are robotic themselves?  They’re just matching the performances of their costars.

Read the rest of the review after the jump