Despicable Me 2

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Despicable Me 2  (C).  I saw the first film in this franchise a long time ago and then recently rewatched it with the family. It was, just as I recalled, pretty good, with some scenes at the end that really tugged at the heartstrings. (Click here for my review.)  Then we watched this sequel from 2013.  I would say it’s mildly entertaining.  Former supervillain Gru (voice of Steve Carell, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World) has gone straight, trying to raise the three orphaned girls he adopted in the first movie and working on a new business making jams and jellies.  But a new supervillain is on the loose, and the Anti Villain League taps Gru to help sleuth out who the new criminal mastermind is.  This requires Gru to go undercover as the proprietor of a cupcake shop at the local mall where the new supervillain is supposed to be hiding out.  And perky AVL agent Lucy Wilde (voice of Kristen Wiig, Paul) is assigned to be his partner in anti-crime.  Lots of stuff is going on in the background—oldest daughter Margo (voice of Miranda Cosgrove, School of Rock) has her first crush on a boy, minions are getting kidnaped, and Gru submits to going on a date with a pushy neighbor’s friend.  A few amusing moments here and there, but pretty mediocre overall.

My Little Pony: A New Generation

The Movie Snob reviews an instant classic.

My Little Pony: A New Generation (B). Hey, I always thought these productions were called “My Little Ponies.” You learn something new every day. Anyway, I’m no “brony,” but my five-year-old daughter loves these shows, and they are a cut above some of the childish dreck out there. (I’m looking at you, Polly Pocket.) According to the internets, this one was supposed to get a theatrical release, but COVID changed the plans and Netflix bought it up for its platform. This show is set long after the events depicted in the series that features Applejack, Rarity, and that gang. Magic has disappeared from the land of Equestria, and earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasi have become estranged from each other. But one earth pony named Sunny (voice of Vanessa Hudgens, High School Musical 3) thinks this state of affairs is based on a big mistake, and after a unicorn named Izzy (voice of Kimiko Glenn, Nerve) wanders into town, she and Sunny set off on a quest to set things right. Some notable names show up in the credits, like James Marsden (Enchanted), Sofia Carson (Descendants), Ken Jeong (TV’s Community), and Michael McKean (This Is Spinal Tap). IMDB.com says it’s rated PG, but I don’t see why it didn’t get a G rating; it seemed perfectly family friendly.

Soul

A new review by The Movie Snob.

Soul  (B-).  This recent Pixar release starts out with a pretty ordinary set-up.  Joe (voice of Jamie Foxx, Ray) is a middle-school music teacher who longs to be a jazz musician.  He gets his big break in the form of an invitation to sit in with a famous jazz combo but he suffers a fatal injury several hours before the gig and becomes a disembodied soul riding a conveyor belt through the cosmos towards a blinding white light.  Desperate to get back to Earth and fulfill his dreams, he jumps off the conveyor belt, and that’s when things get weird. Instead of finding himself back in his body, or in somebody else’s body, Joe lands in a surreal realm where little baby souls (which have heads, bodies, and arms but float around without legs) are outfitted with character traits before being dropped to Earth where they will be united with bodies.  Joe teams up with number 22 (voice of Tina Fey, Mean Girls), a baby soul who deliberately never completes her outfitting and so has existed in this pre-birth limbo for eons without ever being born.  Joe and 22 manage to get to Earth, but all sorts of complications ensue.  It’s a weird, trippy movie, and it kept me wondering what would happen next, that’s for sure.

Star Wars

The Movie Snob goes back to the beginning. The real beginning….

Star Wars (A-).  I recently re-watched this old classic, probably for the first time since I started this blog.  Of course it’s awesome.  I still wonder how our little band of heroes was able to navigate the anonymous halls and corridors of the Death Star so easily on their very first visit, but never mind.  I also ding the filmmakers for not trimming the film a tiny bit to make it a G-rated movie.  There are a few mild but unnecessary expletives, and a couple of scenes that are unnecessarily gruesome.  (The scene of Luke Skywalker’s home after the storm troopers have murdered his aunt and uncle; the bloody severed arm in the Cantina scene.)  But who knows; maybe the filmmakers reasonably feared a G rating would hurt box office.  In recent years I managed to get my picture taken with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, Corvette Summer) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher, When Harry Met Sally) at comic-book conventions. I doubt I’ll ever score the trifecta by getting Han Solo (Harrison Ford, American Graffiti), though.

The Muppet Movie

New review from The Movie Snob.

The Muppet Movie  (C).  I’m continuing my romp through the classics with this recent offering from fathomevents.com.  Although I enjoyed the muppets TV show in my youth, I never saw this, their first theatrical release, which came out in 1979.  Turns out I didn’t miss all that much.  It’s the story of how Kermit the Frog (voice of Jim Henson) decided to follow his dream of being an entertainer, left his swamp, and hit the road for Hollywood.  It’s a road-trip movie, with Kermit picking up a band of oddballs (Fozzie Bear (voice of Frank Oz), Miss Piggy (Oz), Gonzo (Dave Goelz), etc.) along the way while simultaneously being pursued by a fast-food-frog-legs entrepreneur (Charles Durning, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) who wants Kermit to be his front man, er, frog.  The jokes and sight gags really aren’t all that funny, but the frequent musical numbers tend to be better (especially Kermit’s wistful “The Rainbow Connection”).  There are loads of celebrity cameos, including Edgar Bergin, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, Big Bird, and even Orson Welles, but only Steve Martin’s rude waiter is very funny.  I’m glad I saw it, but I doubt I’ll ever watch it again.  (I might look for “The Rainbow Connection” on iTunes, though.)

Alan Parsons Live Project (concert review)

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Alan Parsons Live Project.  As I get on in years, it surprises me when I find myself going to a rock and roll music concert.  Until recently, the last concert I saw was The Zombies, which was right about three years ago.  But a couple of weeks ago I ended that drought by seeing an old favorite of mine, British rocker Alan Parsons.  If you’re not familiar with him, he started out as a technical guy on some Beatles albums and, most famously, on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album.  Then he formed his own studio band called The Alan Parsons Project, and they scored several top-forty hits back in the 1970s and early 1980s.  Their biggest hit was “Eye in the Sky,” but they had decent chart success with other songs like “Time,” “Games People Play,” and “Don’t Answer Me.”  Their instrumental “Sirius” has become famous as the music that gets played before the game at Chicago Bulls home games.  Anyway, I was a fan of the Project’s light, radio-friendly psychedelia, and I bought like ten of their albums back in the day.

Anyway, Parsons eventually decided to do some touring, and back in the 90s I actually caught his live show at Dallas’s since-demolished Bronco Bowl.  Now he’s touring again, and some buddies and I saw him at the Theatre in Grand Prairie.  Although Eric Woolfson, who sang lead vocals on songs like “Eye in the Sky,” died several years ago and had a remarkable voice that no one else can really evoke successfully, it was still quite a good show.  The band played for about an hour (including almost all their top-forty hits), took an intermission, and then played the entirety of the Project’s 1977 album I, Robot.  Unfortunately I had to leave before the encore, but the internet indicates that the band probably came back and played “Games People Play” and “(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” to wrap up the night.

In sum, it was a solid show.  Any Parsons fans out there should check out the show if it comes to a town near you.

 

Pictures from an Institution (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob.

Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy, by Randall Jarrell (1952).  I recently bought a Barnes & Noble tablet—I think it is called a Nook HD+ or something like that.  I bought it for its wi-fi/email capability, but I thought I would also try it out as an e-reader and see how I liked it.  (I had previously tried a little old Amazon Kindle and did not care for it.)  So I read this old novel on the Nook and, although I guess it was ok as a reading experience, it’ll be a while before I’m ready to give up dead-tree books entirely.  (I do think I might be willing to try a magazine subscription or two on the Nook though.  Such subscriptions seem to be less expensive, and I tried one issue and didn’t really mind reading it on the gizmo.)  Anyway, I thought this novel was decent but not particularly great.  It’s about a small women’s liberal-arts college back in the day, and a few of the people who populate it—like the vacuous president, the gimlet-eyed guest writing instructor who’s really just collecting observations for her next novel, and the resident composer, a European exile who is one of the most humane people in the bunch.  It’s a short book, and enjoyable enough, I suppose.

Drag Me to Hell

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Drag Me to Hell (B-). I enjoyed director Sam Raimi’s movies Evil Dead and Army of Darkness (especially the latter), so I gladly paid my $1.25 to see this movie at a local cheap cinema. I guess it was about what I should have expected, although I had no idea Oscar nominee Adriana Barraza (Babel) was in it. Young, fresh-faced Alison Lohman (Big Fish) plays Christine Brown, a loan officer who’s angling for a promotion. To show her toughness, she denies an extension to a hideous old gypsy woman whose home is being foreclosed upon. This sets a dire chain of events in motion as the gypsy attacks Christine in the parking garage after work and puts a terrible curse on her. The curse manifests itself in a series of creepy and disgusting supernatural assaults on the hapless Christine. Her bland boyfriend and a friendly psychic try to help her, but will she succeed in breaking the curse before she is . . . dragged to Hell??? It’s reasonably scary and unreasonably gross, so don’t say you weren’t warned!

Ireland (country review)

Notes from Abroad: The Movie Snob Does Ireland.

I just returned from a weeklong vacation on the Emerald Isle, and I thought I would share a few comments and observations.

C.I.E. Tours. This was my first time to go on a package-vacation sort of deal, getting thrown in with a bunch of complete strangers and getting chauffeured all over the place by tour bus. I have to say that I rather liked it. The company, C.I.E. Tours, is apparently some sort of affiliate of Ireland’s national transportation agency, and the whole vacation was pretty well planned. The only exception, I would say, was the day we arrived in Ireland. Like every other time I have gone to Europe, we all arrived in Dublin early in the morning, and C.I.E. really didn’t have anything for us to do until midafternoon. We were dropped off at our hotel, but we were there way too early to get into our rooms, so we left our luggage at the front desk and basically had nothing to do except wander around for a few hours before the tour got started in earnest. But this was a small glitch, and everything else was nicely organized and well-scheduled.

I would add that our tour director and bus driver, Brendan Heneghan, was a delight. He has been with this company for about 25 years, but if he is at all tired of driving American tourists around he never showed it. His love of Ireland was self-evident. I thoroughly enjoyed his frequent commentary on the landmarks, the countryside, and the Irish history behind the sights we were seeing. He even sang a few Irish songs for us and wasn’t half bad. Plus, he was an excellent driver; how he managed to maneuver that bus through all the tights spots and narrow turns we encountered (all while driving on the wrong side of the road) is beyond me.

Ireland. Absolutely beautiful, even in mid-October with the high tourist season in the past. We were very fortunate in the weather, getting only one really rainy day in the whole week. Although it was cool or chilly every day, it never got really cold. Our itinerary included two days in Dublin, followed by a drive through southwestern Ireland and stop at famous Blarney Castle. Then we spent two nights in Killarney as a base for a daylong drive around the famous “Ring of Kerry,” which is a scenic route around a particular peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. From there we moved to the more blue-collar city of Galway as our base for other scenic drives through the rugged terrain of the Connemara region, a visit to the famous Cliffs of Moher, and a catamaran ride in Killary Harbour, billed as Ireland’s only fjord. Along the way we drove through plenty of picturesque villages and past a million rolling green hills and meadows. I could finally sort of understand why the Irish make such a big deal about their homeland. It really is a jewel. Also, the booming Irish economy was evidenced everywhere by ubiquitous commercial and residential construction. According to our tour guide, Ireland’s population has finally started to grow again after being stagnant for 100 years or more.

Entertainment. I thought the highlight of the tour was the very first night we were there, when it was arranged for us to have dinner and then see some Irish dancing and music at a place in or at least near Dublin called The Abbey Tavern. The show started with a few Irish dances by three young folks, maybe even teenagers, demonstrating the fancy footwork that became so famous with the Riverdance craze ten years ago. Then a band of five older gentlemen and one younger woman took the stage to play some Irish music for us, and they were absolutely superb. They said they perform there seven nights a week, so if you ever go to Dublin I urge you to check out their show. I was so taken with the Irish music that I kept watching for another opportunity to see some more live music, and I actually did see a band called The Irish Weavers while we were in Killarney. They were good too, but the band at The Abbey Tavern was better.

The Ugly American. Our group consisted of 33 Americans, plus one young Australian woman who joined our group as we left Dublin. I witnessed no behavior that would put the USA in a bad light until the very last day of the tour, during the rather long morning bus ride to Shannon Airport. Our bus driver Brendan was doing his usual routine, mixing bad jokes in with colorful commentary about Ireland and the things we were driving by. He may have sung us another song. And at one point, he asked if anyone had any requests for him. I was sitting about a third of the way from the front of the bus, and I was mortified to hear one of our group (a middle-aged guy who had looked surly and unpleasant all week) sitting very close to the front say, “Yeah — shut up and drive.” I could not believe my ears. It was unspeakably embarrassing.

In summary, with only a couple of minor exceptions, it was a great trip. Ireland is a beautiful country, and you should seize any opportunity to pay it a visit.

Wild Safari 3D; A Mirror in the Roadway (book review)

A movie review from The Movie Snob

Wild Safari 3D: A South African Adventure (B). The parents were in town for the holiday weekend, and getting them to the movie theater can be a challenge. But they were pretty easily talked into checking out this new 3D movie at the local IMAX theater. The movie takes you on a tour of various wildlife preserves in South Africa in search of the so-called “big five”: elephants, rhinoceroses, cape buffaloes, leopards, and lions. Some of the movie is filmed from the back seat of an all-terrain vehicle driven by our cute and spunky tour guide Liesl, and other parts seem to be filmed from other vantage points very close to the animals. These animals are filmed in pretty much normal conditions—hanging out, drinking at water holes, eating what’s left of a kill—so they don’t really do a whole lot. Also, the narration was not all that informative, although I did learn that when leopards come together to mate, they do so up to 100 times over the course of three days. Good, but not great.  (The movie, I mean; not the leopard mating.)

A book review from The Movie Snob

A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World, by Morris Dickstein (Princeton University Press 2005). This is a collection of essays, mostly literary criticism about twentieth-century novels that I have not read. However, I read a very favorable review of the book, so I thought I would give it a try. It was quite good, and it pointed me to several books and authors that I will definitely try to read to improve my acquaintance with twentieth-century literature. Interesting essays cover the work of Willa Cather, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others.

5000 hits

The Movie Court has just recorded its 5,000th visit! The justices would like to thank their loyal readers for their ongoing support. If anyone can think of a way that we could make some money off of this, please let us know.

Welcome to The Movie Court

Okay. I think I sort of have the hang of this. The goal of this blog is to present for public edification my views and those of a few friends of mine regarding whatever happens to be on our minds. Usually this involves movies, and which movies we’ve seen lately, and how we felt about them. In fact, some of us have taken to keeping a big list of all the movies we’ve seen, and we rate the movies and let everybody else on the list know when we have added one. I’ve seen about 605 movies, which is about 35 more than my friend Angie has seen, and she keeps saying that she is catching up with me, but I’m like no way Angie, you’ll never catch up with me.

Anyhoo, welcome to The Movie Court.