Movies / TV
Movie: Role Models (Review)
Role Models is a good example of what a true comedy movie needs to be: Funny. I’m not exactly sure where this genre has been hiding the last year or so, but there has been an evil being trying to masquerade as one. It’s about time that Comedy return to slay the dull and Role Models is just the one to do it.
The plot of Role Models involves two friends, Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott). Danny’s girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks) breaks up with him, the guys break some laws and are assigned to community service. Their punishment was to take part in a mentoring program lead by Gayle Sweeny (Jane Lynch), ex crack addict and quite frankly pretty insane. Danny gets paired up with a role-playing knight of LAIRE named Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and Wheeler gets the joy of hanging out with the foul mouthed 10-year old nightmare that is Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson).
This movie comes off as a simply fun movie. The characters are well written and there is enough of a consistency of humorous parts that the movie never seems to settle down. Development of the character relationships flowed smoothly, without ever missing a beat that this movie is supposed to be funny (a rare thing lately). A good combination of banter between the characters lead this to it’s success, and a few shoots of Scott getting hit in the nuts didn’t hurt.
Though fairly new to the stage, Thompson and Mintz-Plasse (yes, he was McLovin’!) did a fantastic job and if nothing else may have even cast a shadow on the veteran acting skills of Scott, Raul and Lynch combined. I can only look forward to seeing some more greatness out of these two.
Overall, I was really impressed with this movie. Being that comedies are by far my favorite genre out there, it’s nice to see that there are actually still some people working in Hollywood that are willing to put some effort into making one solid movie instead of trying to squish it together with another one (ie romantic-comedy) to get a bigger audience. If you build it well, they will come. And did I mention they dressed up as KISS?
Final Score: 9/10 ‘Almost as good as seeing her whispering eye’.
Movie: Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Review)
Steve Carr’s Paul Blart: Mall Cop, starring King of Queens Kevin James and hottie Jayma Mays, comes off as a pretty funny movie in the trailer. Fair warning, it’s not.
The whole idea of this movie is that an overweight failure of a security guard is caught up in an organized crime in the mall and has to stop it on his own. Throw in a crush on a kiosk worker and low blood sugar and you have yourself a movie. Unfortunately, they forgot to include good writing with this story line, which leaves the movie with a hollow half-assed feel to it.
The acting itself really wasn’t that bad, but the characters just didn’t have enough substance to carry the movie. If they weren’t going to give us a hardcore decent fulfilling plot, at least give us some character background or slapstick humor. Given that these are the top two factors needed for a successful movie of these genre, it’s fair to say that the mark was missed on this feature.
All in all, Mall cop seems to fall short of being a comedy as I only found myself with one chuckle the entire course of the movie (which was also in the trailer, go figure). The only real entertaining thing that I found was that on an episode of King of Queens Kevin James was forced to shave his mustache because his wife said he “Looked like a motorcycle cop”. Oh how things repeat themselves.
Final score: 3/10 ‘Buy this from the dollar bin when it shows up at the dirt mall’.
Movie: Street Kings (Review)
I went into this movie not actually knowing what movie it was, which is the best state ti be in for movie watching imo. It wasn’t until about 20 minutes into the movie that I realized ‘hey I think I saw a trailer for this’. Quick summary is saying that Tom (Reeves) is a detective who is top dog and kills people. He then gets caught in a weave of corrupted cops and scandals.
The plot annoyed me for the only reason that I went most of the movie feeling as though I was watching a sequel. There was a gap between the first scene and the second (which started the chain of events) that was so poorly and briefly explained that I had to pause it and think/make up what ‘might’ be the reason for this (that and to get banana bread). If there is going to be a linear plot, the inciting force has to be explained well. Aside from the initial gap, the rest of the movie had a decent flow to it.
I can’t say anything about the selection of actors, Reeves played his part well: Dumb and simple. With a supporting cast of Whitaker, Cedric the Entertainer, Mohr and Nolasco (Go Sucre!) it was well cast.
The only thing I would have liked to see is a little more character development. They noted on the fact that Tom was drinking a lot, but it had no significance to the plot. The same goes for his romance, no significance. If you’re going to try giving a character a life, give him a reason to have it or avoid it all together and throw in some more explosions.
Overall it wasn’t all bad for a movie about cops.
Final Score: 6/10
Movie: Twilight (Review)
Movie: Twilight
Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Thriller
To start off, I was going into this movie with big expectations since 2008 seems to be the year of the vampire. I wouldn’t consider this a good representation though.
A quick summary: Girl (Bella) moves to new town and becomes the new girl in high school. New Girl falls in love with outsider kid (Edward Collins) who is a vampire.New Girl and Vampire have strange relationship, girl almost gets killed by evil vampire. End.
The nitty-gritty that bothers me of this movie is not only the inconsistency within itself, but the fact that the attributes of these vampires seem to be lacking towards those that we commonly know. For example, these vampires do not sleep at all (aka no coffins). I can live with this I suppose, it doesn’t effect the plot. However, they also are able to survive sunlight. In fact, not only does it not harm them at all it makes them shiny. Worse off, the Collins’ family states they only drink animal blood and it is left at that. Well there goes the entire vampire aspect of these people.
The plot itself that annoys me is that for the first hour and twenty minutes of this movie you could replace the ‘vampire’ factor of Edward (the male love interest) with just a pale emo kid and it wouldn’t change the plot at all. There is no real vampire-human obstacles that they’re overcoming here, just a lot of him saying “I don’t know if I resist myself”. *yawn* Now at this 1h20m point, it does a complete 360 degree turn here and suddenly they’re being chased by an evil vampire (who was awkwardly placed in the story might I add) and they’re trying to kill Bella. So it was 1h20m of high school emo garbage then the final 30 minutes is a horribly cliche fight scene.
As an added bonus to this pathetic attempt of a movie, Edward is able to read minds. He can’t, however, read the mind of Bella. He also often refers to her as ‘the one’ or similar there of because she has a different scent from the rest of the humans. It might just be me, but I’m pretty sure I already saw this before…Oh yeah, on True Blood. Suki (the female on True Blood) has the different scent and she can read minds. She is also in love with a vampire named Bill. It looks to me like somebody stole somebody else’s idea and just mixed it up. I think I like True Blood better.
Final Summation: Avoid this movie, watch True Blood on HBO instead. If you don’t have HBO, run over your face with a lawn mower, it’s still more entertaining than this movie.
Score: 4/10
Come along, you belong!
Feel the fizz, of Coo Coo cola.
It’s the cola for makin’ you proud
Take another sip and be one of the crowd
You belong with Coo Coo Cola.
Now for those of you NOT totally cool, that is one of the songs from one of the coolest shows EVER Chip n Dale: Rescue Rangers. To be more precise, this is from from The Case of The Cola Cult (Part 1, Part 2) which is one of the best episodes ever.
Because of that, I decided to use the song as my ring tone. Bet nobody else will have that one on their phone. Unless of course you click the big picture at the bottom of the post, which is totally cool too.
And don’t forgot to buy it on DVD. Or Just Buy it for me!
Come along
You belong
Feel the fizz of Coo Coo Cola
Get to the store and take all you can carry
We got the flavors- orange, grape and cherry
Feel the fizz of Coo Coo Cola
Come along
You belong
Feel the fizz of Coo Coo Cola
It’s bottled in Pensacola
Come along with Coo Coo Cola
You belong with Coo Coo Cola
Movie: Blood Diamond (Review)
I’m so going to hell for this post.
So I just got finished watching Blood Diamond and to be honest it was a pretty good movie. The actors seemed to be well cast, the plot was fairly steady and there were enough explosions to keep me awake. Overall entertainment value for the movie was pretty high, since I’m usually not one for movies with any real meaning or purpose.
There is only one catch: When the credits started rolling I wanted to shoot innocent people in the face. Now wait, hear me out! In the movie there were kids laughing and joking, drinking, doing drugs, setting stuff on fire and shooting innocent villagers at point blank range. There is a part of me thinking “That is awful” but at the same time I have the devil on the other shoulder saying “Dude, you didn’t do any of that. Your childhood sucked”. I wish they’d at least show the kids getting killed or something, they made it look too cool to be a bad guy. Oh and did I mention that the kids got cool nicknames like ‘The Destroyer’ and ‘Babykiller’? Well they did. It made evil look awesome.
Final score: 8/10
Movie: Hancock (Review)
I just want to start by saying Will Smith, you suck. The movie started off good: a drunk asshole of a superhero. He played that really well, almost too well. But then he went to jail and became all goody-goody. Now before anything starts saying “Yes Jeff, but you knew that would happen” they just did a really bad job at it.
Actually, on second thought I’m not even going to bother writing a full review of this movie. The explanations that the movie gave for a lot of the stuff was just plain stupid. If it wasn’t for the drunk references at the beginning this movie would have been a total flop, instead of just bad.
Score: 4/10
Movie: Transformers (Review)
Movie: Transformers
Genre: Action
I REALLY didn’t want to write a review for this movie. I honestly can’t even figure out why, but I just didn’t care for this movie, it rubbed me the wrong way. There were tons of explosions and everything, but I found (and it seems to be just me) that almost all of the robots looked the same. I seriously couldn’t tell who it was that got killed until the 2nd time I saw it. I think it’s the fact that when they’re fighting they’re far too shiny and you can’t see the colors as well.
The plot itself was OK I guess. It’s not supposed to have an awesome plot, it’s robots beating the living tar out of each other. The plot they had going on with the teenagers was boring, didn’t care, wanted robot on robot action.
Overall it wasn’t a bad movie, but I wasn’t happy with it. In all fairness, I wasn’t going into it with very high expectations given that it was directed by Michael Bay. My brother seemed to have loved it though, he bought it the day it came out on DVD. That said, check it out and see for yourself.
Final: 4/10
No please, not the TV!
The other day (Friday to be exact) I went to check out one of my favorite sites for keeping up to date on TV shows (since I don’t have cable) and movies,TV-Links.Co.Uk. To my dismay, I found only 404 errors. I was hoping in the bottom of my heart that it was just having technical difficulties. Well, it wasn’t so.
TV-Links was a site which linked to videos hosted around the internet (on sites such a YouTube and Stage6), almost all of which were copyrighted TV shows. This worked great for many people, they could watch all the TV for free. It also allowed those who were denied access (due to the area they lived in) to watch shows which are legally broadcast on the TV station’s websites to see it in an alternate form. However, they did not host any of the videos themselves, just linked to other sites and people who were hosting them.
On Thursday the owner of the site was taken into custody by Gloucestershire police under section 92 of the Trade Mark Act. The humorous part about this is that the site didn’t violate copyright laws. They were not hosting the files, nor did they upload them in anyway. They simply supplied a link to where they were located. Were authorities looking to point fingers it would be the users who uploaded them. The only thing they can legally do is subpoena the site’s owner to find out where the links came from, which would result in a long chain of ‘he said, she said’. Complete foolishness if you ask me.
More on this:
TV-Links man was arrested under trademark laws @ The Register
Movie: Mr.Woodcock (Review)
Title: Mr.Woodcock
Genre: Comedy
I have to say before the movie even started I thought the movie was funny. I mean with a name like Woodcock and having a mind in the gutter how could you not? As for the movie itself Billy Bob Thornton continues to be a very entertaining man…and a total dick (thus Woodcock becomes even funnier!). Combine that with Seann William Scott (Stifler from American Pie <3) and this movie is pure gold. This is the story of an asshole gym teacher and a kid who grows up and writes a book about self-esteem and ‘letting go’ of the past then comes back to find out that the same gym teacher is back home nailing his mom. That’s just good writing.
This is the kind of movies that true comedy lovers live for, without having to sit through the “romantic-” parts of the movie. This is right up there with Badder Santa, and is great.
Final: 9/10 “You must like getting spanked, Farley. I guess it runs in the family”