Monsters University

A movie review from The Movie Snob,

Monsters University  (C).  I only dimly remember the 2001 animated film Monsters, Inc., and I think I liked it OK.  Twelve years later, Pixar came out with this prequel, which I just saw.  The little green one-eyed monster Mike (voice of Billy Crystal, The Princess Bride) has the ambition to be a “scarer” when he grows up, and he gets into Scare School at Monsters University.  There he quickly gets crossways with another freshman, a big, blue, natural-born scarer called Sully (voice of John Goodman, 10 Cloverfield Lane).  And then it gets very predictable: opposites Mike and Sully are both kicked out of the program.  Desperate to get back in, they team up, join the lamest fraternity on campus, and try to carry their fraternity to an underdog victory in the Scare Games in hopes of being let back into Scare School.  Lots of vocal talent, including Steve Buscemi (Fargo), Nathan Fillion (Serenity), and the formidable Helen Mirren (The Queen) as the crusty old Dean Hardscrabble, can’t lift this overly long (104 minutes) movie above mediocrity.

Atomic Blonde

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Atomic Blonde  (D).  So I was shooting the breeze with a couple of guys at work, and we were talking about movies.  Expecting no contradiction, I offered the opinion that Wonder Woman‘s Gal Gadot is probably the most beautiful movie star working today.  To my amazement, one of my colleagues demurred.  “Have you seen Atomic Blonde?” he asked.  Recalling that this was a poorly performing spy movie starring the admittedly gorgeous Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road), I resolved to check it out.

Theron is gorgeous, but the movie is a mess.  During the last few days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a British super-spy-assassin (Theron) is sent to Berlin to find and recover a list of a bunch of spies from a KGB guy gone rogue.  Her connection there, the local British spy chief, is a squirrelly guy played by James McAvoy (Atonement).  A cute French spy played by Sophia Boutella (Star Trek Beyond) engages in some inappropriate spygames with Theron.  Oh, and the whole thing is told by Theron’s character in flashback, so we’re constantly getting yanked back into a boring room in London where she swaps supposedly hard-boiled dialogue with John Goodman (Kong: Skull Island) and Toby Jones (Morgan).  The highlights are the exquisitely choreographed fight scenes, and I must admit they are better filmed and more entertaining than the incomprehensibly cut gibberish you see in most action movies these days.  But I had problems even with the fight scenes.  I could suspend disbelief long enough to accept that Charlize Theron is such a supernaturally fast and agile fighter that she can defeat thugs two or three times her size simply because they can’t land a punch on her.  But I can’t accept that she can actually absorb full-on body-blows from the same thugs and still keep up the fight.  She may be a ninja, but come on, a supermodel-skinny woman is not going to get up after some of the punches she takes in this movie, no matter how much of a ninja she is.

Kong: Skull Island

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Kong: Skull Island (C).  If my records are correct, this is the 1,600th movie I have ever seen, so I wanted to celebrate the milestone with something big.  This incarnation of Kong is plenty big, but overall the movie was disappointing.  The year is 1973, and an eccentric guy (John Goodman, 10 Cloverfield Lane) somehow persuades a senator (Richard Jenkins, The Cabin in the Woods) to authorize military assistance for an expedition to an uncharted South Pacific island that looks kind of like a skull.  Goodman borrows a tough-as-nails colonel (Samuel L. Jackson, Unbreakable, at his Samuel L. Jacksonest) and a few more good men from the winding-down Vietnam War.  There are several other members in the expedition, but only Tom Hiddleston (Thor) and cute Brie Larson (Short Term 12) make any impression, as a British ex-special-ops guy and an anti-war photographer respectively.  The assembly of the team and the initial foray into the island are the best parts of the movie; once the monsters started to show up, I lost interest in a hurry.  It’s a long two hours.  Stay through the interminable end credits for a bonus scene.

10 Cloverfield Lane

The Movie Snob dishes up a new review.

10 Cloverfield Lane  (B).  I didn’t see Cloverfield, so I have no idea how or if this new movie dovetails with that one.  But if you like your movies suspenseful with a side of intense paranoia, this may be the movie for you.  The set-up is fast and intense.  Within the first few minutes, an attractive woman named Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Smashed) flees her current boyfriend for undisclosed reasons, gets into a bad car wreck in the middle of nowhere, and wakes up in some sort of underground bunker.  Her captor, Howard (a menacing John Goodman, Argo), insists that the world above ground has been destroyed in some kind of “attack”—possibly by Martians.  Obviously he seems to be crazy . . . but is he?  There are some parts when I just couldn’t suspend disbelief, but the movie generally managed to keep me in the moment.  One final note: the theater where I saw the movie had the volume uncomfortably loud a lot of the time, to the point that I covered my ears sometimes.  Maybe it was just the place where I saw it (a Studio Movie Grill), but be warned!

Community – Season Three

DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Community – Season Three.  (B-)  Quick refresher: Jeffrey Winger (Joel McHale, The Informant!) is a slick ex-lawyer who has been disbarred because he never got a college degree.  So he has enrolled at Greendale Community College to earn a degree and hopefully get his law license back.  Way back in the pilot episode, he inadvertently formed a study group with five lovable misfits—plus a rich old geezer named Pierce Hawthorne (Chevy Chase, Caddyshack), who is not lovable at all.  The show is all about the study group’s escapades, and it’s full of absurdist humor about how terrible a school Greendale is.  I strongly urge you to get a hold of Season One and give it a try.

Unfortunately, Season Three is not as good as Season One and Season Two.  John Goodman (O Brother Where Art Thou) has a recurring role as the dean of Greendale’s air-conditioning-repair school, and the season-long plot arc in which he attempts to recruit Troy is just not very funny.  Somewhat funnier is Abed’s season-long obsession with a British TV show called Inspector Timespace (a transparent  Dr. Who clone).  Early on there’s a really interesting episode in which the gang is gathered in Troy and Abed’s apartment for a housewarming party, and when the pizza delivery arrives they roll a die to decide who has to go downstairs to get it.  For the rest of the episode they play that scenario out seven different ways, depending on who goes to get the pizza—kind of a butterfly-effect sort of thing.  There’s also a funny episode that is an homage to Law & Order, right down to the theme music.  And they get pretty good results repeating a gimmick from the second season: a clip show in which all the “clips” being remembered by the characters are actually brand-new scenes.  But lots of episodes fall flat, like a Christmas episode done Glee-style, and one in which Shirley and Jeff take on some German foosball bullies.  My favorite character, the cute and ambitious Annie Edison (Alison Brie, The Five-Year Engagement) has some decent episodes.  I thought Britta (Gillian Jacobs, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World) got a little cheated on screen time, but her bits tended to be very funny when she was on.

As I understand it, Community barely escaped cancellation after the third season, the network fired series creator Dan Harmon, and they are now airing a shortened 13-episode fourth season.  And last I heard a fifth season was still a possibility.  I’m crossing my fingers and hoping they get their groove back.

Argo

Mom Under Cover checks in with a new review.

Argo  (A).  I have only vague recollections of the Iranian Hostage Crisis of the late 1970s; keeping up with foreign affairs wasn’t my top priority in junior high.  The details of this operation were de-classified in 1997 by President Clinton–so don’t despair if you have no memory of this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale of CIA agent Mendez (Ben Affleck, Gone Girl) extricating 6 U.S. diplomats from the Canadian embassy in Tehran by posing as a Hollywood film crew scouting locations for a sci-fi movie.  Director and star Affleck gets the pace just right.  Tension mounts appropriately—Argo is an energetic thriller (even if the real story did not end in the Hollywood-esque chase down the tarmac).  John (Atomic Blonde) Goodman (as make-up artist (Planet of the Apes) and CIA operative John Chambers) and Alan (Sunshine Cleaning) Arkin (a jaded Hollywood producer past his prime) deliver the needed humorous moments of the film–a reminder that Hollywood is Hollywood in 1979 or 2012.  The 6 “houseguests” are well-rounded characters.  Affleck delightfully under-plays Mendez. You won’t be disappointed!

Trouble With the Curve

New from The Movie Snob.

Trouble With the Curve  (C-).  I am not a particularly big Clint Eastwood fan, but I think Amy Adams (The Muppets) is a good actress and as cute as a button.  So I went out and saw this new release, fortified by a favorable review in the Dallas Morning News.  I was disappointed.  Eastwood (Unforgiven) plays Gus, an aging and ailing baseball scout for the Atlanta Braves.  Gus has been a widower for like 30 years, and he is not close with his only child, a daughter (Adams) named Mickey after Mickey Mantle.  She’s a driven lawyer on the verge of making partner at some big Atlanta law firm.  But when Gus’s pal Pete (played by a truly walrus-like John Goodman, O Brother Where Art Thou?) tells Mickey that Gus is having health problems (especially with his eyes), she drops everything to go on one last scouting trip with her old man.  As they follow some high-school hotshot through various podunk towns, Mickey attracts some romantic attention from Johnny (Justin Timberlake, The Social Network), a washed-up pitcher turned baseball scout.  I can’t quite put my finger on why, but the movie just isn’t very good.  The scenes and the dialogue are sort of clunky, and the big reveals that are supposed to explain these characters’ foibles aren’t very convincing.  And the romantic subplot feels tacked-on and arbitrary.  Sorry, but Trouble With the Curve struck out with me.

ParaNorman

A new review from The Movie Snob.

ParaNorman  (C-).  The trailers for this animated film piqued my curiosity a little bit.  It appeared to be about a little kid named Norman (voice of Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Road) who, like a kid in a certain blockbuster movie some years ago, possesses the “gift” of being able to see and talk to ghosts that are invisible to everybody else.  His paranormal talent makes him a social misfit, even within his own family, but it may help him save the day when something happens and the dead begin to rise from their graves.  Plus, the trailers used that groovy old Donovan song “Season of the Witch.”  Anyhoo, the movie turns out to be a pretty bland affair–not very funny, not very creepy, not really much of anything.  It kind of reminded me of that movie from some years ago called Monster House, in that the moviemakers seem to try really hard to come up with a fresh, original “scary story,” but the story just isn’t that involving.  I will concede that the climactic scene was fairly satisfying, but that little victory was offset by a couple of totally unnecessary sexual references.  I didn’t recognize many of the voices, but Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) voices Norman’s annoying older sister, and John Goodman (The Big Lebowski) voices his weird uncle Prenderghast.

The Big Lebowski

DVD review from The Movie Snob

The Big Lebowski (A-). I am sorry I have missed out on the pleasure of this Coen brothers movie for so long. A plot summary can’t begin to convey how bizarrely off the wall the film is. Jeff Bridges (Starman) is an amiable California slacker named Jeff Lebowski, known to his friends simply as The Dude. He likes to drink, smoke marijuana, and bowl with his buddies Walter (John Goodman, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) and Donnie (Steve Buscemi, The Island). But then a couple of thugs mistake him for a wealthy old man who happens to share his name, and then when the old Lebowski’s trophy wife (Tara Reid, Josie and the Pussycats) gets kidnapped, he taps The Dude to be his ransom courier. Things quickly spiral out of The Dude’s comprehension, much less his control. Julianne Moore (Children of Men) is hilarious as the old man’s avant-garde-artist daughter. A couple of dream sequences are way, way over the top. (How does one conceive of the image of Saddam Hussein getting your bowling shoes for you?) Oh, and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers is in the movie, too. I laughed out loud several times, and I never stopped rooting for The Dude. If you like the Coen brothers’ quirky sense of humor, this cross between Raising Arizona and What’s Up, Doc? should hit your funny bone.

Confessions of a Shopaholic

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Confessions of a Shopaholic (D-). Long-time readers of The Movie Court know I don’t really go in for chick flicks. Independent films (Henry Poole Is Here), bawdy comedies (Stepbrothers, Role Models), foreign films (A Secret), documentaries (Under the Sea 3D), and rough-and-tumble action fare (Quantum of Solace, Inkheart) are much more my cup of tea. So I don’t know what possessed me to see this movie about a New York girl with a credit-card-debt problem, who miraculously lands a job writing a financial column for a magazine edited by a handsome Brit. Isla Fisher (Definitely, Maybe) is cute and game, and I have it on good authority that Hugh Dancy (The Jane Austen Book Club) is a good-looking fellow, but this movie is simply terrible–long, boring, and simply not funny. And a remarkably fine supporting cast (John Goodman, Arachnophobia; Joan Cusack, School of Rock; Leslie Bibb, Iron Man; John Lithgow, 2010; Kristen Scott Thomas, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen; Julie Hagerty, Airplane!) is truly and utterly wasted. Save your money. Save your time. Save yourself.