Naked Hobo

Alice (Mia Wasikowska), now 19, returns to the amazing Wonderland of her childhood, though she doesn’t remember any of it.  As is the norm in Wonderland she meets many interesting characters, the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), ther Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum (Matt Lucas and Matt Lucas).  The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) has seized control of Wonderland from her sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway).  Now Alice must defeat the Red Queen’s champion, the Jabberwock to free Wonderland from an oppressive regime.

With any Tim Burton film you at least know you are going to get a visual feast.  This is no exception.  However, you also don’t know if you are going to get a good movie or another “Planet of the Apes”.  This film falls somehwere in between.  Generally Depp works well in Burton films.  The Mad Hatter though, I don’t know, there was just something about him, something I can’t quite place.   The casting in general was good though, how can you go wrong with using Gary Oldman for voice over work.  Christopher Lee as the voice of the Jabberwock, and I have always enjoyed Helena Bonham Carter.  However, no character really seemed to stand out to me, something that can be a problem in any Burton film, characters are overwhelmed by the scenery.

This is probably about the 100th adaptation of Lewis carrol’s story to be brought to film, and perhaps that is part of the problem.  There is so little left to explore here, so few stones that haven’t just been simply over turned, but they have been polished, smashed, and turned into dust.  This may lead you to believe that I really didn’t like the movie, but that isn’t entirely true.  I liked bits of it.  The whole thing together though seems a bit disjointed and leaves you with a feeling as if things were a tad rushed.  I understand that the entire story of Alice in Wonderland is a kids story, well, for the most part it is, but I found at times the film was overly childish.  Maybe I’m just getting old, 3 Axes.

John Joe (Bernard Hill) is an Irish musician preparing for the All_Ireland Ceili finals.  His not so welcome brother Jimmy (Colm Meaney) is coming back to Ireland from Liverpool with some lads to compete as well.  The two brothers will seemingly stop at nothing to win the big prize.

This was a fun and cute little movie, it helps if you like some good Irish tunes.  The presence of Andrea Corr doesn’t hurt either, she is rather nice on the eyes, and rather talented too.  As far as the leads go, I’ve always been a fan of Colm Meaney and Bernard Hill, so I had no disappointments there.  The rest of the cast does an admirable job and everyone seems to mesh well.

I like these light comedies with a bit of a dark undertone to them.  Watching the history of the two brothers unfold is interesting, and I thought the slow reveal was well done without dragging things out for too long.  And again, Andrea Corr is gorgeous.

My only real negative about this movie is that it only makes me feel sad in that I miss Ireland.  I so want to get back, and I really don’t know why I punish myself with movies like this.  Sure, it may not be the perfect representation of Ireland, but it is a fair slice of Irish culture though.  I am biased with these Irish films, so maybe my vote is a little higher than it should be, so accept it or feck off, 4 Axes.

For some reason we are continuing the American Pie saga, now with the wedding of Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan).  Uncomfortable humor abounds as we see yet again how completely impossible it would be for someone like Jim to even live long enough to get married.

This is slowly becoming the Friday the 13th of comedies.  The first film was pretty good, then the second one went downhill, and they decided to make a third one.  This is a franchise that they are going to attempt to milk every penny from, and it will be to our detriment.  The film as a whole isn’t awful, it just isn’t anything new.  Wow, Jim is awkward.  Wow Stifler (Sean William Scott) is a ass, there is nothing new going on in this film.  If this was a stand alone movie it would be a little better because I wouldn’t have heard all the jokes twice before.

I can’t fault the cast really, they did nothing wrong, other than agreeing to be in this.  They all do the same job as they did the first two times through.  Eugene Levy is still Eugene Levy, and everyone is the same as before.  Maybe that is the real problem, if I really wanted to see the same stuff over and over again I could just pop in the original “American Pie” and watch that, I don’t need a slightly different setting to enhance the experience, 2 Axes.

After being in suspended animation for 500 years, Private Joe bauers (Luke Wilson) awakens to find a changed America.  Due to a continued dumbing down of society, people can barely take care of themselves and the average Bauers is now the smartest man on Earth.

One may think that a screenplay by Mike Judge and Ethan Cohen might at least be decent.  One would be thinking wrong.  Now I don’t expect high brow anything from Mike Judge, but this was scraping the bottom of the barrel so badly that there are scratch marks in hell.  Maybe it is because people that are so incredibly stupid that all you want to do is punch them annnoys me more than it entertains me.  I know what they were trying to say with this movie, but it was so dull and so lackluster that I didn’t care.  I know we are raising generation after generation of more dependent and less functional people.  Well, not all of us, but some of us are.  I see it every day in my job and the people I see at the grocery store, the movies, anywhere.  I want to see a movie for some form of escape, not to be reminded that there are idiots everywhere and that they are slowly ruining society.  I guess this film did succeed in making me think, and making me angry.  So, if that was part of the goal, mission partially accomplished.  It was still an awful movie though, 1 Axe.

Female pirate captain Morgan (Geena Davis) and her companion Shaw (Matthew Modine) race against another pirate, Dawg (Frank Langella), to find a hidden treasure.  Through in some Royal Navy guys and you’ve got a bag of action and adventure.

Or not.  This film managed to make pirates seem really boring.  Long ago, well, 15 years ago, when this came out it got awful reviews and totally flopped at the box office.  I can now see why.  I really need to find something better to do with my time, at least I was building a model while this excrement flowed from my television.

Geena Davis, I don’t know if it is her slightly bug eyes or her kinda whiny voice, but she bugs me.  Matthew Modine, well, he’s never been a great actor and he truly peaked with the wrestling wonder that was “Vision Quest”.  You think you can act, but you can’t act can ya.  I have always liked Frank Langella, but he plays such a cardboard cutout bad guy that his talents are wasted.

I expected to be disappointed by this movie.  In that regard I was not let down.  So, as far as my expectationts went, they were met, maybe even exceeded.  Still, this movie should be put away forever.  Wait, no, it should be shown to future film makers as an example of how to waste tons of money and still not have anything to show for it.  Or they could just keep wathcing Michael Bay films.  This was a real stinker that makes me wish pirates were just make believe, 1/2 Axe.

First of all, I refuse to use the term SyFy.  They may be all excited and happy with the name change, I just think it’s dumb.  Almost as dumb as someone spending their Saturday night watching three movies in a row on said poorly named cable station.  But, I did, and so we have some stuff to get through.

“Beyond Sherwood Forest” (2009)

For starters you get your typical Robin Hood stuff, King Richard is off somewhere and his inept brother Prince John (David Richman Peck)  has been left in charge.  This time John has come up with the idea of allying himself with the Danes by offering up Maid Marian (Erica Durance) in marriage.  The, as always, evil Sheriff of Nottingham (Julian Sands), has found a new way to pacify Robin Hood (Robin Dunne).  A half breed human and Sylvan girl, Alina, is cursed to transform into a ferocious dragon.  The Sheriff has her heart and controls her to do his bidding.

This film ended up being the highlight of the evening.  Now don’t stop reading because you want to see it, you don’t.  It was the highlight of a rather painful evening.  If the other movies were cancer and aids, this one is cholera.  Not as bad as the others, but still not something you want to actively seek out.

Maybe I am being a bit too harsh on this one.  It wasn’t awful.  It was right about what one would expect from a simple 2nd tier fantasy film.  I need to keep that in mind more often.  Not everything can be as grand and magical as “Willow”.  My biggest problem was the dragon aspect.  I give them praise for trying something new with the Robin Hood story, but they unfortunately failed to deliver a compelling enough story.  The dragon almost seemed secondary.

The dragon also looked pretty awful.  Again, these films don’t have the budget to bring in someone like Weta do to the CG.  I get that, but if it is gonna look this bad try something else.  Bad CG is just atrocious, Ray Harrhausen did better effects 40 years ago with stop motion.

I will say that the acting was above average for a film of this caliber.  Everyone seemed to at least have taken one acting class.  No one really stands out as great, but no one sticks out as awful either.  It just seems to me that so much more could have been done to make this story a little better.  The whole Sylvan aspect just seemed tacked on, which made me not really care about it.  Maybe I am just burned out on the whole bad run of Robin Hood films, 2 Axes.

Moving on…

“Beauty and the Beasts” (2009)

So, sticking with familiar stories we now have a retelling of Beauty and the Beast.  We have Belle (Estella Warren) and we have a beast (Victor Parascos).  But, this time we also have an evil troll conjured up by the equally evil Lady Helen (Vanessa Gray).  In her efforts to get Count Rudolph (Rhett Giles) made the new king, Helen hopes to use the troll to frame the poor beast as a murderous savage.

And, now we go down a few steps from the last movie.  The biggest star here are Estella Warren’s tits.  They are about the only thing worth watching in this turd.  it isn’t so much that the story is bad, it is more that everything else is really terrible.  The acting is horrendous, their really isn’t anyone redeemable in the cast.  So many utterly ridiculous things happen that it becomes laughable at first, and then quickly moves on the tiresome, then to annoyance.  A dozen guys fire arrows into an open window in the hopes of killing the beast.  Of course they miss and kill the soldier that was sent in to the building instead.  Now, I saw this coming from a mile away, but when his arrow riddled body appears I almost choked on my diet Fanta.  Every arrow hit this one guy, all in the chest too.

But, there are bouncing boobies to watch.  Of course I have the internet for that.  So, why did I watch this again?  Oh right, to save you all the trouble, because I know many of you were aching to see this.  Again, don’t.  1 Axe, it would be higher but I can see boobs in Maxim.

And finally…

“Merlin and the War of the Dragons” (2008)

To wrap up our old stories retold poorly, here we have a young Merlin (Simon Lloyd-Roberts) being trained as a wizard by the Mage (Jurgen Prochnow).  There is another student though and he gets all evil and starts turning people into dragons and waging war against the Britons.

Jurgen, Jurgen, Jurgen.  Things must be bad.  To have come from such greatness as “Das Boot” to this.  At the very least the acting in this one is slightly better than that of a pair of breasts, but not much better.  If this tale tells me anything it is that Merlin was too stupid to have lived long enough to ever be of use to King Arthur.  I did get to see a wonderfully motivating speech that was so obviously a rip-off from “Braveheart” being given to an army of about 9 guys.  Seriously, you couldn’t find a few more Rennies to be in your movie?  I just can’t believe I stayed up until 4am watching this.  Again it seems I will never learn, 1 Axe.

A rag doll robot simply known as 9 (Elijah Wood) awakens in a post apocalyptic world.  He soon meets other rag dolls, and then inadvertently awakens an evil machine that seeks to destroy everything.  9 soon discovers that he holds the key to regaining the world’s lost humanity.

While this is an “animated” film, it is definitely not one for kids.  The setting is grim, bleak, desolate, and full of death.  In many ways this is simply a kind of “Terminator” rehash, this time done with rag dolls in place of Sarah Connor.  Even though it is a rather short film, just a little over an hour, it still seems to move along rather slowly.  I was very excited about this movie when I first heard about, and now I am glad I waited to see it on dvd.  The whole thing just seemed to kind of underwhelm me.  The idea is really nothing new, though the rag doll robots are kind of neat, and there really isn’t much to it to make me want to really care.  Once again mankind has made a machine that will turn against him, and once again I get what could have been a really cool movie but is only just a fraction of that, 2 Axes.

When Bower (Ben Foster) wakes up from cryo-sleep he can’t remember his mission, or even who he really is.  Once he wakes up a second crew member, Payton (Dennis Quaid), he sets off on the ship to try and find out what is going on.  Along the way he starts to regain bits of his memory, and he also discovers that things have gone terribly wrong on the spaceship Elysium.

This movie was better than I expected it to be.  It has a bit of an “Aliens” feel to it, the claustrophobia of the tight cramped spaces on a spaceship, the dark lighting, the constant feeling of something nasty being just around the next corner.  Of course it isn’t as good as “Aliens”, but it is still a decent sci-fi flick and worthy of a dvd rental.

I am really starting to like Ben Foster as an actor.  Now, like most typical sci-fi flicks there isn’t a lot for an actor to flex his acting muscle on, but he still does a good job as Bower.  Dennis Quaid, well, he is Dennis Quaid, you get what you expect to get out of him.  he isn’t a great actor, he isn’t a terrible actor, he is just Dennis Quaid.  The rest of the cast, eh, typical filler folks to either help or hinder the hero, the norm in a movie like this.

Now the story, well, it does have some serious faults, and I am just about ready to give up and let plot holes go, but I still have a little fight left in me.  There are plenty of questions that aren’t ever really answered, and maybe that was the intent, to leave some things a bit ambiguous.  However, you are never really told what is actually going on, and things kind of blur the lines between what is happening and what is imagined.  Again, maybe this was intentional, but at times it was a bit annoying.

Not a total dud, but not a grand slam either.  This film is fine as a sci-fi Bmovie, maybe B+ movie.  I think they could have done a lot more with the story and the ending is a bit cheesy, but an okay effort overall, 2 1/2 Axes.

Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) is an aging former country singer.  At the age of 57, years of alcohol abuse and smoking have taken its toll and the former country icon finds himself roaming from town to town, playing gigs in lounges and bowling alleys.  When he meets ayoung report, Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), he starts to turn his life around.

In many ways this film is just another in a long line of middle age redemption stories.  I think one of the things that sets this film apart from many of those others is Jeff Bridges.  This is the role of a lifetime for him.  Now, I will admit that for me, he wills always be “the Dude”, but his portrayal of Bad Blake is Oscar worthy.  I also didn’t know that Bridges could sing, which he does quite well.  With a strong supporting cast you get great characters to go along with a decent story.  Notice, I said decent story.  This is nothing against the screenwriter, it is just that this is such an overused theme that there isn’t a lot of wiggle room for creating something truly new.

The director, newcomer Scott Cooper. does a good job of pacing the movie wonderfully.  The film is slow with a sober and determined path, exactly the flow this tale requires.  Bad Blake isn’t some crazy thrill seeking adrenaline junkie, he is a broken down cowboy, and the direction goes a long way to showing you that.  The ending of the film was no surprise to me, and I am glad they didn’t go totally sappy with it.  I hate the Hollywood idea of everything ending perfectly with a big red bow on top.  Life isn’t like that.  Did I dislike the ending?  No, there really are only so many things you can do in a story like this, so while I found it predicatble I didn’t find it disappointing.  This is one of my favorites from 2009, and Bridges will hopefully get that elusive trophy soon, 4 1/2 Axes.

Now there is an ancient manuscript that must be protected from the evil angels.  A lone woman must defend the book against many foes.

These films are really just one story, and it is best to view them back to back.  Okay, it is best not to view them at all, if I am being honest.   The one good part if you do watch them though, they are both rather short.

Without Christopher Walken this series is more than just dead, it is decayed.  He brought a certain quirkiness to the films that is sorely lacking in the final two installments.   When your biggest name is the likes of Kari Wuher of “Sliders” fame you can’t expect much.  Sure, she’s nice to look at, but the niceness ends there.  The whole concept is just too tired, too worn out, too over played, and should just be put down.  Hopefully these atrocities will be the final nails in the Prophecy coffin, 1 Axe, but only because I am in a good mood.