Movie Releases - April 2012

I have some free time today so I thought I'd write about the major movie releases coming in the next couple of weeks.

American Reunion
American Reunion is the only wide release this coming weekend. No wonder that guy in charge of distribution for Wrath of the Titans feels rather confident his movie will earn a decent amount of dosh in its second weekend.

I suppose everybody in my age group would have seen and liked the first three movies. Well, 9 years after the 3rd one, we are served American Reunion. Most of the actors have not done much in these 9 years, which is probably why they all made it back. Seann William Scott was in a few movies for a while, I quite liked The Rundown. Alyson Hannigan went into How I Met Your Mother and has probably been the most successful.

Even if I was still watching movies here in Singapore, I would give this one a miss. You can never know what kind of censoring they will do to R-rated movies. Not worth paying $10 to end up missing out on tits.

Anticipation Factor: 3 out of 5. Tara Reid looks as hot as ever on this movie poster.

 
The Cabin in the Woods
They might be repetitive but I love movies that starts out with 7 or 8 characters who get killed off one by one. I thought this was one of them and to a certain point, I suppose it will be.

But given that it's produced by Joss Whedon and written by the writer of Cloverfield (which I didn't bother watching), there will most likely be some aliens in there. That's also fine with me, I love movies in space that start out with 7 or 8 characters who get killed off one by one.

Anticipation Factor: 4.5 out of 5. What's not to like?

Lockout
From the producers of Taken and also starring Maggie Grace, it's a wonder this movie doesn't have Liam Neeson in it! The plot looks decent enough: set in the near future, "Lockout" follows a falsely convicted ex- government agent, whose one chance at obtaining freedom lies in the dangerous mission of rescuing the President’s daughter from rioting convicts at an outer space maximum security prison.

I love an action movie set in the future. Guy Pearce is a pretty good actor. Not sure why they keep casting Maggie Grace as the "innocent" daughter though.

Anticipation Factor: 3.5 out of 5. That gun looks kick-ass.

The Three Stooges
This movie's poster (see further below) reminds me of Dumb and Dumber. The guy on the left has the exact same haircut that Jim Carrey had. And now I read they're finally doing a sequel.

I haven't seen the original movie or TV series or whatever it was, so no nostalgia for me. The poster boasts "No Brain" as if that's supposed to encourage me. Isn't there enough "No Brain" stuff in reality shows on TV and in 21 Jump Street?

Anticipation Factor: 1 out of 5. Will try but with my finger constantly hovering over the Stop button.

090810 - Movie Outing

Went to the movies last night, for the first time in 2009. That says a lot about the movies that have come out this year.

Even when we went to Thailand a few weeks ago, only Transformers 2 and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince were out. And we always like watching movies in Thailand.

Anyway, finally broke the 2009 duck with G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Movie was alright. Action-packed, great effects but with a few annoying characters and corny moments.

Best thing about the movie is Sienna Miller. This chick's hot!!

090802

Movies
Have caught up on a few movies recently. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was the only good one.

Blindness sucked. But I'm still not sure what the hell those blind rights group were complaining about. Everybody (except Julianne Moore) went blind anyway and obviously some of them were nasty but that doesn't say anything about blind people in general. Those rights groups are always kicking up a big fuss about the smallest things.

The Day The Earth Stood Still sucked too. Silly story, just some 90-minute sorry excuse of an ad for Will Smith's annoying kid. That kid would have been reason enough to kill off all humankind.

TV
Finally completed BBC's Robin Hood. Nice little series. Richard Armitage (Guy of Gisborne) and Keith Allen (Sheriff of Nottingham) steal the show. Honourable mentions to Joe Armstrong (Allan A Dale) and Harry Lloyd (Will Scarlett).



Just started watching True Blood. Not bad so far.

2008 In Review - Movies

Did not spend much at the cinemas this year but watched a lot of movies anyway. :$ :D

Here are some short opinions of the Top 5 movies at the box office + the ones I most remember.


The Dark Knight - Great movie, great fun. But dulled somewhat by the hype.

Iron Man - Probably my favourite movie this year. A lot of hype on this one too but most of it came after it was released.


Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - Mostly entertaining but aliens? That South Park episode got it right, Indy was raped. And did it really need Shia LaBeouf? Does any movie need this guy? Someone in Hollywood must have a hard-on for him.

Hancock - Over-rated, a very weak plot and overall a whole lot of non-sense. It's movies like this that give summer flicks a bad name. But Charlize Theron looked hot.

Wall-E - Never knew robots could be this cute and full of emotions. Had watched the trailer and wondered how that would turn out but Disney/Pixar knew what they were doing. :)


Kung Fu Panda - Not bad up to when the fat Panda got good at kung-fu.

Saw V - Anyone who knows me well knows my love for the Saw movies and the twists. But not too happy with this one. Did not feel like much of a twist this year.

Hellboy 2 - One of the 6 movies I saw at the cinema this year. Had high expectations because I had loved the first movie, left mostly disappointed.

The Happening - Watched it in Thailand but not even that could make this movie look good. Not sure what M. Night Shyamalan is trying to do. If he can't come up with good stories anymore, it's really okay to direct scripts written by other people.

The Incredible Hulk - I thought it was quite good. If that's what they had come up a few years ago instead of that turd Ang Lee put out, maybe we could have had a sequel.

Tropic Thunder - Hadn't expected much from a movie directed by and starring Ben Stiller but this wasn't too bad. Retards are funny.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor - Like Hellboy 2, a disappointment when compared to the previous movies.

You Don't Mess With The Zohan - Hilarious. :O Funniest movie I've watched this year.

I Am Legend sucks

I wasted 90-100 minutes of my life last night watching I Am Legend. Boring movie with a pretentious title to boot, Will Smith only went into this one for the money.

If this movie had been released during the summer, it would have struggled to make even half of what it has made so far. But since it was released in the shit-but-profitable December dumping ground, it made tons of $$$. Like that other piece of crap Night At The Museum did in 2006.

No mistake about it though, this movie is not worth anybody's time and certainly not worth the increasingly expensive cinema ticket price. Good thing I didn't pay a cent to watch it. Now if only I could get those 1.5hrs of my life back.

Movies in April

Watched these 2 very entertaining movies during our recent trip back to Singapore. It's worth paying $8 or $9 a ticket for entertaining movies like these ones.

Oscars 2007

Well the Oscars have been handed out. As usual, the results are mixed feelings all over, not to mention it's always unsettling that rather obscure movies end up being nominated to contend for the statues.

Nominees for Best Picture were:
The Departed - $131.5m
The Queen - $51.3m
Little Miss Sunshine - $59.7m
Babel - $33.2m
Letters From Iwo Jima - $11.8m

Next to the titles are their Cumulative Gross as of last weekend. Only The Departed crossed the $100m mark. The other movies have the nominations to thank for a fair part of their box office total but yet didn't make that much money.

I'm fairly happy The Departed won the Oscar for Best Picture as it's most likely to be the only one out of the 5 nominees that I'll bother to watch.

By the time 2006's Oscar ceremony came along, I had watched only Crash and it's still the only one of the 5 nominees that I have watched. Fairly safe to say that I won't be watching the rest.


About the other Oscars handed out:
- I'm glad The Departed won an Oscar for Best Director for Martin Scorsese. It was about time.

- In the Best Actress category, I had hoped Meryl Streep would win the Oscar for her icy queen role in The Devil Wears Prada. But instead it went to Helen Mirren for The Queen, once again a movie with rather limited appeal.

- Not entirely displeased to see Forest Whitaker take the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in The Last King Of Scotland. I don't like Leo DiCaprio much, he still looks too much like a small boy to be taken seriously. And I didn't like Will Smith taking on that boring role in The Pursuit Of Happyness and meddling to put his own son in the movie.

- I'm happy that Pan's Labyrinth won a few Oscars but it's a travesty that it didn't win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. At one point, Pan's Labyrinth was a reasonably serious contender to be nominated for Best Picture!! But it was shut out of that category and now it's lost the Best Foreign Language Film award to some half-assed movie from Germany.

- Throughout the Award season, I have been mystified as to how people rate Dreamgirls and its cast so highly. While Eddie Murphy didn't end up with the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (I wonder whether his Norbit roles cost him), I'm mad to see that Jennifer Hudson won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. The woman is a singer struggling to make a name for herself and was asked to play a singer struggling to make a name for herself. Not exactly the hardest role, was it? They could have put any young black singer in the role and she'd have done as good a job of it. Hopefully she'll catch the curse of the Oscars and end up being forgotten.

- I'm not happy to see how movies that are essentially musicals are increasingly a feature at the Oscars. I think Moulin Rouge startedthis all. Then there was Ray. Last year, we got served Walk The Line and the Best Actress award went undeservedly to Reese Witherspoon. And this year, the hype was all about Dreamgirls. I don't like the genre and certainly wouldn't mind seeing less of these movies being made.