Dinner for Schmucks

This is what you might call a disaster-comedy film; not in the sense that it’s a disastrous failure (it isn’t), but that everything consistently goes wrong. In the past I’ve never really enjoyed movies of this sort. As a pessimist I get upset when stuff happens as I expect it to. However, there’s a lot to like about this movie, so it kind of makes it okay.

Steve Carell stars as a pretty charming middle-aged guy who has a hobby in mouse-taxidermy, making pretty awesome dioramas mostly depicting events from his sad life. Still, he’s a very happy guy pretty much all the time, seemingly ignorant of the destruction he’s causing (though always apologetic afterwards). His intervention in the life of Paul Rudd’s character takes every wrong turn possible but of course ends happily.

The main event of course is the titular dinner, in which a bunch of business executives bring “extraordinary people” to laugh at so they feel less like the nincompoops that they are. Tim (Rudd) brings Barry (Carell) to the dinner so he can secure his place in a new office and get a bigger paycheck. The lead-up to the dinner establishes that Tim isn’t doing this out of spite for Barry, and that he’s really just a good guy who’s trying to impress a girl by being successful, so you’re not supposed to hate him. Anyway the dinner is a lot of fun, bringing in Zach Gaifianakis, Chris O’Dowd from The IT Crowd, and a bunch of other funny people to show off their inane talents. Before and after the main even we are also blessed with the presence of Jemaine Clement in a role very unlike his character in Flight of the Conchords.

The movie is a remake of a French film which I know almost nothing about, but I assume it’s probably better. The ridiculousness of a lot of the situations is just a bit too much. Still, it was pretty funny, and Steve Carell is always fun to watch. Also the Fool on the Hill intro was pretty great.

Despicable Me

This is one of those movies that looked like it might be really cool when information started getting out about it. The shadow-profile of the protagonist, Gru, looked really stylish and not very funny. Then the minions became the main focus, and they were all funny and stuff. Still cool. Then the kid plotline reared its ugly head and all hope was lost. Still, it turned out to not be a complete bust.

The story is that this Russian-esque, Steve Carell-voiced, so-called villain is trying to be more of a real villain and thusly decides to steal the moon. Turns out visiting the moon has been a life-long dream of his, so it’s kind of a big deal for him. He has to deal with a new-comer villain to reach that goal, and in a rather stupid twist of events, it seems the only way to do this is to adopt three horribly cute girls who have a talent for selling cookies. The movie then becomes less about Gru’s faulty masterminding than it is about melting his cold heart and realizing that he likes taking care of cute things. You can guess how it ends.

It’s still quite a funny movie though. There are a bunch of pretty great one-liners and lots of explosive slapstick comedy. The minions (little yellow dudes) are of course a large source of laughs, with their unintelligible jabbering and even more slapstick humor. Even the kids are funny from time to time, although usually they just ended up annoying me. I think it would have been a much more enjoyable thing if they’d found some other way to make it an acceptable kids’ movie. Heck, they could have just made it a short.

Inception

 

Row row row your boat, gently down the stream.

Christopher Nolan’s made some good movies. These include Memento and The Dark Knight. Those two movies in particular are important to mention in reference to this movie, because it probably wouldn’t exist without them; it is in a way the combination of the first’s cerebral jack-hammering and the latter’s enormous action-film scope. Nolan’s been working on this for a while, and 10 years after its inception (heh), it’s finally come to life and the big screen.

The conceit (yay new word) of the film is that there’s this new technology of some sort that allows people to insert themselves into other people’s dreams, and sometimes have rather extensive control over them; seemingly the most profitable use of this tech is to extract information from a sleeper’s mind. Leonardo DiCaprio has taken this as his main gig. His life is pretty screwed up though, and this screwed-upness starts leaking into his carefully constructed mental heists. With the help of a fantastic cast including Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page, Leo attempts to pull off one more caper without destroying himself while under the influence of heavy sedatives.

Dreams are weird. The movie deals a whole lot with lucid dreaming and that thing where you keep waking up over and over before you actually wake up, which has always bugged the hell outta me. Since pretty much anything can happen in a dream, this makes the possible roads the movie could take pretty limitless; of course it is limited by a ~2.5 hour timespan and a budget less than the United State’s national debt, so it can’t be that amazing. Still, it’s pretty darn. There’s lots of antigravity stuff and neat architectural tricks, and a healthy dose of explosions and gunfire.

Aside from the action there’s some very nice and sometimes subtle emotional stuff going on, which I thought made the movie all that much better. The best part of it though is the uncertainty of what’s actually happening; there’s really no way to be sure if any of it is actually happening outside of someone’s mind. I got a big kick out of the audience’s reaction at the end. There are probably going to be a lot of people who hate it just because of that.

Anyway. Best movie of the year so far. Go see it.

Predators

The first Predator movie was good mostly because of Ahnold’s incapability to be taken completely seriously, which led to funny bits within a lot of macho gun-slinging and blood-letting with neat sci-fi monsters and junk. A great combination. Ahnold is not in this one; still, it doesn’t really suffer for it.

Quite purposefully, Predators mirrors the second movie in the Alien series (Aliens), by attaching an ‘s’ to the end of the title. It also has more than one baddy oddly enough. Aliens had an ensemble cast, and so does this one. Aliens was a good movie, and so is this one. The problem with most of the other Predator sequels has been an overabundance of action and very little in the way of multi-dimensional characters; this time around, a whole ton of effort was put into finding good actors and giving them great developmental arcs (though varying in length, of course. This is still a slasher movie of sorts). There are short bursts of action throughout the movie, surrounded by quite nice character interaction, including a few side-busting quips from one or two of the guys.

Anyway, the movie’s about a bunch of hard-asses that get stranded in some place they don’t recognize in order to be hunted down by Predators for sport. They all have unique stories related only in the aspect of badassery. As you might expect, the movie involves cutting them down one-by-one until a satisfactory conclusion is reached, which I think was accomplished quite nicely.

Most of the strategic decisions are believable, though sometimes the explanations seem a bit coddling. Adrien Brody is usually the man with the plan, but doesn’t always tell everyone, which makes him cooler. I’m really quite happy with most of the roles he’s taken lately. I guess he figures one Oscar is enough. The rest of the cast varies in its colorfulness; Topher Grace seems a bit awkward sometimes, much like in Spidy III, but he doesn’t suck as much as that did. Some guy named Walton Goggins plays a convict-type and provides most of the comedy. Danny Trejo is his awesome self as usual, Laurence Fishburn doesn’t quite hit his stride but works well enough, and some Asian dude is pretty awesome in the stereotypical Asian action-hero fashion. The rest I don’t really care all that much about.

I suppose if you’re not a sci-fi fan, you probably won’t like this movie. Since I am definitely one of those dudes, I kept seeing things in here that just made me smile like a baby in a room full of bright colored objects. Robert Rodriguez now has a significant bit more of my respect.

Now let’s all try to forget Predator 2 and all those AVP abominations.

Concert Review: Rain at Wolftrap 2010-06-26

I like The Beatles. I used to not like them very much, but now I do, so it was pretty cool to get to see the supposed best Beatles cover band in the world. They’ve been playing since around or before 1986, so they know what the heck they’re doing.

It’s a really neat show. They start out dressed in black suits like Brian Epstein made them wear when they first got out of obscurity, playing their hits from that era. Then they moved on to Sergeant Pepper outfits as seen in the picture, and all the other eras as well. Wigs and fake mustaches were worn, but I don’t think that took away from the authenticity of the performance; pretty much everyone’s voice was spot on (George was a bit off), and the playing was perfect. They had a guy playing keyboards and stuff for the later material so they wouldn’t have to rely on backing tracks.

The multimedia/video part that played on the big screen in the back and two on the side was pretty cool too; most of it was famous Beatles photos with the Rain members inserted into the same poses, and they were done admirably well. Some of the guys really looked the part. Between eras the curtain would go down, and clips from 60s commercials or hippie conventions would be shown with famous non-Beatles tracks like All Along the Watchtower in the background.

They played pretty much hits only, which is to be expected. I don’t think there was anything from the White album. Still it was a good representation of their discography, and the last encore was Hey Jude, which is a ton of fun with an audience of a few thousand people. I enjoyed it.

Toy Story 3

Toy Story is one of the movies my generation looks to as the pinnacle of kid-oriented entertainment. It was Pixar’s first big film in 1995, when I was 9, although I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it in theaters. It was one of the things that got me very interested in computer-generated art, which then led me to programming. I guess you could say it’s had a pretty big impact on my life. The first sequel didn’t affect me as much but it was still pretty good. Now Pixar has stepped up its game, and after 11 years, created a wonderful close to the story of Woody, Buzz and company.

The plot this time is similar to the other two; the gang gets separated from their owner Andy and have a bunch of adventures getting back. This time it’s because Andy has aged along with us and is now going to college, and no longer needs our heroes. Through a series of mix-ups and foibles, the gang is sent to a Daycare center with a dark secret. This is where the movie begins to shine. There are a ton of new interesting characters who I won’t try to enumerate, as they are better introduced by watching the movie, which you should. Safe to say this beats Sid’s room and the Toybarn by a lot.

The thing that made me love this movie is the feeling that it’s not really a kids’ movie. It’s actually an amalgam of adult stories and homages to great films like The Shawshank Redemption, and possibly The Godfather, all dressed up in bright colors to make the kiddies happy. Sure there’s lots of humor and the like, but dang is it dark under the surface. I watched a video review the other day that stressed the idea that these movies are about death, and the inevitability of mortality, and I agree with that pretty strongly. Even though it doesn’t really end in that way, it definitely feels like it’s going to.

Because of this darkness and whatnot, there’s a good amount of emotional stuff. You’re probably going to cry a bit. Those Pixar writers have the engineering of tears down to a science. Good thing most of the movie is freakin’ hilarious.

Get Him to the Greek

Hey look, it’s another movie with that fat guy in it. That was my first reaction. My second was, “hey, it’s that one dude from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which had Kristen Bell in it so it was pretty enjoyable!” Then I found out that he’s playing the exact same character, which is cool. Both movies are by the same guy so he can do stuff like that. There’s even a fun little nod to Sarah somewhere in the middle.

This is quite a different movie though. Sarah Marshall was pretty reserved really, a pretty cautious sort of touching comedy. Get Him to the Greek is both-barrels-blazing shocker full of laughs from start to finish. It’s at least partially music oriented too, so that’s pretty neat. The story is about this one fat guy Aaron who works for a record label, and they need to make some money. Aaron’s a fan of this rocker dude who used to be mega popular, but then released a real drug-fueled catastrophic stinker of an album and fell from glory. The fat kid figures since it’s been a decade since rocker dude’s seminal concert at the Greek Theater, they should put on an anniversary show. He’s eventually given the task of bringing the rocker over from England or somesuch place back to the US. Then the fun begins.

Aldous Snow (the rocker) does drugs and stuff. Aaron isn’t that kind of guy, but he’s been told by his boss to enable Aldous as much as possible so he’ll put on a good show. Aldous of course doesn’t care much about that part, more just doing crazy drug/women stuff and making Aaron take part. This is in rather violent opposition to Aaron’s lifestyle of quietly submitting to his girlfriend’s wishes. He doesn’t seem to resist all that much though once it gets going.

Aside from the raucous happenings, there are several relationship threads that come up, providing a little relief from the insanity, but often weaving into it as well. We’ve got daddy issues, girlfriend/ex troubles, is-he-the-daddy-or-not fun, and awkward sexual encounters among friends. Many funs.

I had the most fun with all the barely concealed innuendo in all of the songs, and Puff Diddy/Daddy’s dialog was often hilarious. There’s a pretty fun cameo or two here and there which were pretty cool too. Gotta say though I’m not the biggest fan of Jonah Hill, AKA that one fat guy. It might not be because of his acting skills or anything though. I dunno. Anyway the movie’s hilarious. I laughed a bunch.