Mini Movie Reviews: Summer 2012 Edition, Vol 1

Titanic 3D

Yup, still good.  Only now it's in 3D.  The 3D quality wasn't bad, either.

So let me get this straight - at the end of the movie, Rose changes her last name to Dawson and goes into hiding to avoid both her mother and Cal.  Her grand plan to achieve invisibility involves becoming a famous movie actress and a highly-publicized female pilot.  Hide in plain sight, I guess.


Cabin in the Woods

F'n brilliant.  The less revealed about the plot, the better.  I will say that laughs and wit outweigh scares, but horror movie fans will still go away highly pleased.  It's intelligently made and inspires much post-viewing discussion and at the same time delivers the goods and pleases the kiddies.  Thank you Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon.


The Pirates!  Band of Misfits

Do you enjoy stop-motion animation, wide-eyed dreamers, witty humor and characters with very large eyeballs?  I do!  The folks at Aardman Animation ("Wallace and Gromit", " Chicken Run", "Shawn the Sheep") have delivered their best movie yet.  Featuring an eye-pleasing combination of stop-motion and CGI, a talented voice cast, lots of laughs for both the kids and the grown-up kids and some of the best quality 3D of the year, I thoroughly enjoyed this one.  Here there be fun!  Here there be quotable blurbs!


The Avengers

Thanks again, Joss Whedon.  The perfect payoff of the 5 previous Marvel movies ("Iron Man 1&2", "The Incredible Hulk", "Thor", "Captain America: The First Avenger"), this movie epitomizes the term "crowdpleaser".  It's pure joy to watch this movie play the audience.  In fact, the opening night audience I saw the movie with whooped and hollered with approval for durn near the entire end credits.  Speaking of end credits, be sure to stick around for not one, but two extra bonus scenes (one for the fans, one for the humor).  Funnier than most comedies, more exciting than most action movies, and with the best, most well-utilized ensemble cast I've seen in a long while, this is one of my favorite summer movies of all time.  The IMAX 3D presentation was of the highest quality, one of the better examples of both IMAX and 3D that I have ever seen.  Thank you, too, Arbor Lakes 16!


Dark Shadows

I love most Tim Burton movies, but this one was a mess.  In trying to be a genre-blender, it fails at each genre.  Not funny or witty enough to be an effective comedy, not scary enough to be a horror movie, and the characters aren't engaging enough to be a good, twisty soap opera.  The script is haphazard, with no direction and no good payoffs.  While the movie certainly looks good and has another great Danny Elfman score (not to mention Eva Green with blonde hair - grrrowwl), Johnny Depp seems as bored in this movie as he was in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides".  It's an even worse film than "Alice in Wonderland" (but not as bad as Burton's "Planet of the Apes").  Oh well, I'm still looking forward to seeing his "Frankenweenie" remake.


Battleship

It's a miss!  Cliche characters, underdeveloped story, boring action sequences - hey, what did you expect from a movie adapted from a board game?

You know what I freakin' expected?  All I wanted was one of the characters (preferably the admiral played by Liam Neeson) to say "You sank my battleship!"  But, no, the filmmakers couldn't even manage that!  Fer cryin' out loud. . .

A couple of good special effects and action beats are not enough to make a good movie.


The Dictator

Sacha Baron Cohen is a funny dude, and this is a funny movie.  In the SBC rankings, it's way funnier than "Bruno" but not quite as good as "Borat".  It's weird, but "The Avengers" and "Cabin in the Woods" are the funniest movies of the year, even more hilarious than my favorite "true" comedy of the year, "21 Jump Street", which is also better than "The Dictator".  Got that?  If you're looking for an irreverent, politically incorrect good time at the movies, you could do worse.  I laughed quite a few times.


Men in Black 3

Or "Men in Black Cubed", like it shows on the poster.

After hearing all of the negative buzz on this movie, I went in with diminished expectations - and was quite surprised by how much I liked it.  Maybe that will change with further viewings, but right now I rank it as "Not Bad".  It's a large improvement over that chunk of dead weight known as "Men in Black 2", but not quite as good as the original.  The storyline had some freakin' large plot holes (join the "MIB" club), but there were lots of laughs, lots of cool Rick Baker aliens, a fun villain played by Jemaine Clement of "Flight of the Conchords", and a great doppelganger performance by Josh Brolin as the young Tommy Lee Jones.  The ending even effectively tugged on my heartstrings a little bit.

In summation - s'okay.


Here's a movie that's far more entertaining than "Battleship".  And scarier than "Dark Shadows".