Oh, you knew I’d have to review this one. My head’s still spinning, but I’ll see what I can do. It’s my fault; I went to the theatre with the Ultrascreen across town, and everything was so huge! It was hard to read the credits, and some of the fight scenes left me reeling.
Speaking of fight scenes, I’m sure this isn’t going to help much, but please, people: Don’t bring your four-year-old to this film. In fact, don’t bring your one-year-old, either. There were kids there that young, and I believe they enjoyed the movie about as much as I enjoyed seeing (and hearing) them there — which is to say, not at all. It may be based on a comic book, but that doesn’t mean it’s family-friendly. It’s PG-13 for a reason, people! There’s violence galore, and blood, and death! Relatively sanitized death, but still. And Venom is really pretty creepy. So don’t scar your little children. Also, if they’re not there, they can’t annoy the rest of us by crying for mommy or asking to go to the bathroom three times. Two hours and twenty minutes is an eternity to a child’s bladder.
Anyway, I imagine you know the basics: Spidey’s back, and there’s gonna be trouble. This time, trouble comes in the form of Flint Marko, a.k.a. Sandman (Thomas Haden Church, who I really only know from watching the occasional episode of Wings, years ago, so this was kind of a shock) and Brock, Eddie Brock Jr., a.k.a. Venom (Topher Grace — I hear he was in some other TV show, which I’ve never seen). Neither character gets called Sandman or Venom except in the closing credits, but all the fanboys (and fangirls) know who they are.
Sandy is an escaped convict when we meet him, struggling to find the daughter he loves. He’s in prison because he loves her so much that he robs lots of banks to try and get the money she needs for an operation, or whatever it is that will fix the unnamed disease she has. She needs an oxygen tank to breathe and a crutch to walk, so it must be something pretty serious, but I’m not sure what would cause both those problems. But it requires money to fix anything, and with health-care costs what they are these days, Daddy has to skip the auctions and bake sales and go straight to grand larceny.
Meanwhile, Eddie wants to make a name for himself as a photographer for the Daily Bugle and smarms his way into a job. Peter’s job. I don’t know how good a photographer he is, but he’s great at being smarmy. Unfortunately, he’s also ambitious and very vengeful. Add to that one icky black alien Venom symbiote; and add to our desparate escaped felon one accidental trip into the middle of an experiment in a particle physics lab, and poof! You have two super villains ready to make our hero’s life miserable.
Now, the birth of Sandman is really cool. They borrow the micro-cam from House to show us the freaky cellular process at work in turning a man into sand, and the sequence of him trying to learn to use his powers is fascinating. It just seems odd that a particle physics lab would be running experiments on a big pile of sand in the middle of the night. I’m no physicist, but I think they usually work with much smaller particles than sand. Much smaller. Venom, as previously mentioned, is seriously creepy, but also very cool. He was never my favorite villain, but he was used to excellent effect here.

Spidey unexpectedly finds himself playing with sand. Cool, huh?

I could keep going a lot longer and still not tell you everything that happened. This movie, like its two predecessors, was packed with plotlines and characters and all the CGI effects you could possibly want. Just think of the post-production on this baby. It’s now the most expensive movie ever made in non-adjusted U.S. dollars (not quite sure what that means; I’m quoting imdb.com), at nearly 300 million. I’d say that most of that went towards effects, but they had a lot of actors to pay, too. Everyone is in it!
Tobey and Kirsten, James Franco as Harry Osborn/Green Goblin Mark II (though he isn’t very green, so they just call him the New Goblin), Rosemary Harris as the delightful Aunt May, J.K. Simmons as the cigar-chewing J. Jonah Jameson, Dylan Baker as Dr. Curt Conners, still not having turned into the Lizard yet — all your favorites are back, and there’s more. Bryce Dallas Howard (looking lovely and being talented as always) is Gwen Stacy in a small and rather thankless role, and perennial character actor James Cromwell is Capt. Stacy — he was a lousy Zephram Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact, but if he’d actually had any real scenes, I think he’d be a great Capt. Stacy.
It all boils down to it being too much of a good thing. There are too many villains, real and imagined, and too many thing happening. I’ve barely mentioned all the problems Peter and Mary Jane have with their relationship, or the whole Goblin thing, and this is already pretty long. Even at nearly two and a half hours, there’s not enough room for everything they try to do. It has all the action you expect and the characters you remember, but it never quite hits the emotional quality of the first two films, especially the second. That wonderful scene with the train passengers tenderly helping the injured Spidey after he saves them is the first thing I think of when I think about these movies, and there’s not a lot here that competes with that. There are some very good scenes with best friends Pete and Harry, but there’s still a certain depth lacking. Let’s not even mention Pete as ladykiller, which only gets embarrassing.
Three idols here. It was enjoyable, and I wouldn’t mind owning it on DVD, but this one was more polished and less endearing than the others, and Spider Man should always be endearing. He’s the underdog, the regular guy doing unbelieveable things who we just have to root for. That’s still here, but it’s starting to be clouded over by the glitz. Do see it on the big screen if you get the chance, though crossed eyes and dizziness may occur if you watch it on the really big screen. Just remember: PG-13!

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Unless of course you’re Cris Johnson, who can see up to two minutes into his own future, and therefore gets as many chances as he wants to make a first impression.
So Nicolas Cage is great. I’ve always liked him. Julianne Moore is great. And I’ve liked Phillip K. Dick’s rather dark, philosophical stories ever since I was a kid rummaging through my dad’s sci-fi collection looking for something to read. Therefore, Next, starring Cage and Moore and based on The Golden Man absolutely has to be a really great movie. Right?
*sigh* No, afraid not. For one thing, the film is only very, very loosely based on the story. The original Cris Johnson isn’t exactly cut out to be a leading man, for starters, and while movieCris is, unsurprisingly, a nice, honest guy trying hard to be an ordinary person, storyCris is — not any of those things. I’m not sure why it is that so many Phillip K. Dick stories are adapted for the screen, and yet the movies never end up with anything more than a passing resemblance to the orignal, top-notch source material, but there we are.
But in the land of celluloid, Cris is a small-time magician/mentalist in Las Vegas — you know, the kind of act where they guess where people are from and make watches disappear, and which can only thrive in Vegas. He supplements his income (the cost of living there probably is awful) with a little dishonest gambling, though he makes sure only to cheat the house. He’s a nice guy, remember. But the casinos are on to him, and Julianne Moore, at the head of a truly scary FBI team, is on to him, and after Peter Falk shows up for two scenes and then vanishes, poor Cris hardly gets a moment’s peace.
He has, in fact, just enough time when he’s not running for his life to find and woo his dream girl. (This is where fifteen chances to make a first impression really come in handy.) He knows that Liz Cooper (Jessica Biel — and I imagine there are lots of men who dearly wish they could see her in their futures) will appear in a certain diner at exactly 8:10, but not the day or even whether it’s morning or evening — because somehow, when this woman is involved, he can see well beyond his usual two-minute mark. This is pretty contrived, but I was willing to go along with it for the sake of the plot.

Cris waits dramatically for the bus that’s due to run him over in a minute and a half.

Soon, however, I was forced to give up on the plot, which was suddenly full of FBI squads, a stolen nuclear bomb, and enough CGI effects to keep every studio in Hollywood busy for weeks. Visually, it’s really an amazing film — the stunts are also contrived, but this actually makes sense, since Cris is in the middle of things manipulating what’s going to happen next. Mercifully, they keep the number of instant replays involved in Cris’ power down to a minimum, since those would probably have made any non-precognitive human dizzy. Unfortunately, the filmmakers do stoop to using such replays for their shock value a little too often. Still, the overall effect is marvelous, and I quickly learned it was best not to think of the plot and just to sit back and feast your eyes.
Julianne Moore, though, is capable of being a very scary lady. She was certainly an excellent fanatic in Children of Men, and here she actually steps it up a notch. I don’t know her exact title, but she’s important. A few words into her cell, and teams are shutting down all communications within a two mile radius. A wave of her hand, and suddenly every lounger in sight is an agent hurrying over to her for instructions. It makes me wonder how many of those road workers that you see standing around are actually waiting for a signal from Julianne.
Though no one else really seems to belive her when she says what Cris can do, apparently even her boss is too afraid to say no to her, because she gets her way. With his (reluctant) help, she knows she can find that bomb before it goes off. Now, the whole bomb thing is still troublesome. It was stolen from Russia, we know that, but the question of who stole it is never explored. Or even mentioned. In fact, they don’t even hint at why it was stolen. Apparently, for some reason, a small group of heavily armed and well-financed French-speaking people decided to steal a nuclear bomb and plant it in southern Califorrnia. They hint at a mean and ruthless boss somewhere, but don’t expect to learn anything about him, either. The only point is that the boss knows about Cris and wants him dead so the grand plan (if there is one) won’t be ruined, and the only point of that is so Julianne and her team have someone to shoot at and Cris has some bullets to dodge. (Precognitives can dodge very well, unurprisingly, but he must have had storyCris’ super-speed as well as his future sight, because he dodges.)
I predict I’m going to give this one just two idols. And I’m right! I might have edged up close to three if I hadn’t stayed for the last ten minutes or so. The ending was — well, I’m still torn on the best adjective. I hate to go as far as “awful”, but I think I may have to. It was definitely not good, and the general mood among my fellow moviegoers after seeing it seemed much the same as mine — namely, that if any of us had the same powers as Cris, we would’ve gone to see The Invisible instead.

Yep, you get two reviews this week! In case anyone’s actually excited by that, though, I should add that this will probably not become a habit with me. It’s just that there was a new Anthony Hopkins movie out, and how could I resist that?
He is of course playing a brilliant psychotic, because that seems to be all he does these days, but he’s a brilliant brilliant psychotic. He plays Ted Crawford, a wealthy man who seems to be some kind of aerospace engineer, but for some reason spends most of his time building machines of various sizes whose sole purpose is to move little glass spheres along shiny metal tracks and through shiny metal hoops. They remind me of a clock I had as a child, which showed the time by stacking ball bearings along little plastic tracks, but Sir Tony’s don’t seem to tell time. As Det. Flores describes one such machine, “It’s a… thing. That does… stuff.”
Sir Anthony is married to the lovely (and much younger) Jennifer, played by Embeth Davidtz. In real life, she’s 41 to his 69, so you just know they’re headed for some kind of trouble. When he isn’t making his gadgets, he’s having his wife followed, and he knows she’s having an affair. The other man is Rob Nunally (Billy Burke), who happens to be an LAPD hostage negotiator, and Sir Tony being as brilliant as he is, he figures out a way to use that little fact to his advantage.
If you’ve seen the previews, you know that he just up and shoots his wife, apparently without any concern for the consequences. But herein lies the brilliance. An open-and-shut, suspect-confessed, we’ve-got-the-murder-weapon case suddenly isn’t any of those things.

I still can’t figure out what it does!

Enter Ryan Gosling as Deputy District Attorney William Beachum. Willy, as Sir Tony calls him when he isn’t calling him “old sport” or “kiddo”, came to LA from a dirt poor childhood in Oklahoma and is now quietly, almost bitterly, determined to succeed beyond even his own wildest dreams. He’s just maneuvered his way (through slightly underhanded means) into a coveted job at Wooton Sims, a top law firm, and he’s leaving the low-paying, overworked life of a DDA behind. He even quickly finds himself a beautiful woman, in the person of his future supervisor, Nikki Gardner (Rosamund Pike, from Die Another Day, who still looks too gorgeous to be a real person). As soon as he finishes this nice, slam-dunk case, that is.
He soon learns the error of his ways. In spite of the old saying that anyone who represents himself has a fool for a client, Sir Tony runs his own defense, and in a deliberately hesitant, uncertain sort of manner, mops the floor with poor Ryan. Now, I hadn’t seen him in anything since Murder By Numbers five years ago (where he was a homicidal maniac), so I wasn’t sure how he’d measure up as the opponent to such a good, experienced actor.
Turns out he does really well. I didn’t quite want to root for him at the beginning — he isn’t a bad guy, but he’s so focused on remaking himself he’s forgotten everything else, and you kind of want to slap him. But then, very slowly and convincingly, he remembers what the law is meant to do, even if it doesn’t always succeed, and by the end of the movie, he’s remade himself in a very different way than he’d intended, and I wanted to congratulate him.
Four and a quarter idols here. There isn’t anything new in the moral dilemma front, but it’s still an interesting struggle, and the film doesn’t beat you over the head with it as so often happens. And the ending is excellent — not a total surprise, but clever and convincing. It’s shot almost like a film noir — everything seems to be either too dark or too brightly lit, and if you look a little, you’ll find reflections and shadows everywhere, showing how easy it is to deceive the eye sometimes. So I guess we have two movies with the same moral this week, even though it would be hard to find two more different mainstream films. And I suppose the secondary moral here is to beware of intelligent men with bizarre hobbies and too much time on their hands.

I was watching the latest episode of InDigital with Wil, Jessica, and Hahn and thinking… “You know? That music is ‘ok’ but it isn’t perfect.” It should be more of a fusion of straight-up rock (with a little clean funk), and crisp electronica. There are people talking about tech. Get it? The people are represented by the rock, and… ok, you get it.
Not only that, but the music should sound reasonable at low levels, and not stomp out the human vocal range.
It should be exciting and peppy without being blatant about it. So, a super fast tempo – that doesn’t sound rushed.
And it needs to be long and loopable… for folks who can’t get a review accomplished in four minutes. :-)
So those were my requirements for this project, and here is the result: Tech Talk
A strong ending would be good… but I didn’t hit that one here. It ends fine, but at low levels you don’t get the subtlety of the guitar fading out. Are you listening editors? Crank the ending if you use the ending!

Is anyone else vaguely surprised that I’m reviewing this? I am. I never thought I’d even type that particular phrase. But a friend of mine living in England (Hi, JP!) who therefore saw this movie some time ago said that I should give it a try, and I did, and here we are. And I actually really liked it.
Now, I’m not normally one for the physical or gross comedy, and there’s some of both in this film. (Actually, there are rather a lot of gross moments, so be warned.) Somehow, though, they carry it off. They take just about every good stunt and memorable moment you’ve ever seen in any action movie or cop flick — even a low-budget horror film or two — turn it upside down and take it for a spin, and it’s really a fun trip.
The stars are Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as Sgt. Nick Angel and PC Danny Butterman, respectively; and yes, they were also the stars of Shaun of the Dead. It’s the camaraderie between them that makes this movie work, I think. They even manage to be the romantic couple of the film, without being anything more than platonic.
Nick Angel is Supercop. No, literally — he has nine commendations, excels at everything from karate to high-speed pursuit to chess, and has an arrest record 400% better than any of his colleagues on the London police force. (Wait, that’s police service now, as Nick reminds us. Force sounds too aggressive.) So good for London, right? Everyone’s glad to have him around? Well, no. This is headstand number one that gets us into the plot — he’s making everyone else look bad, as Bill Nighy (Love, Actually, and I hear he’ll be in Pirates of the Caribbean III, if you’re into that sort of thing) explains in a nice little cameo as the Chief Inspector. Therefore, Nick is off to the quiet, pleasant village of Sandford, in Gloustershire, where there hasn’t been a recorded murder in twenty years. And yes, there’s a reason why they say ‘recorded’.
Sandford has been voted the Nicest Village in England for more years running than anyone cares to count, but on his first day Nick still manages to round up several hardened criminals, though most of them are actually teenagers who just shouldn’t have been drinking. Oh, and one of them is Danny Butterman, son of the local Chief Inspector (Jim Broadbent) and Nick’s new partner. But no one seems to mind, least of all Danny himself, and he and Nick are soon fast friends. Well, at first it’s more that action-movie addict Danny follows Nick like a lost puppy, asking what cool police stunts he’s done and how hard it is to make someone’s head explode, but they do eventually make it to fast friends.

Danny gets to live his dream of flying through the air whilst firing a gun.

Nick is soon convinced that Sandford is not at all a safe place to live, but no one else seems to believe him — after all, everyone’s so happy, some of them aggressively so — like Timothy Dalton, here a much tougher guy than he ever was as James Bond. But after several gruesome deaths (I can’t even begin to choose a most gruesome), he gets Danny to believe, at least, and then things go absolutely wild.
It’s also hard to choose a funniest moment, which does a lot to make up for all the gruesome. There’s a hilarious scene where our heroes go out to an isolated farm to investigate the terrible crime of unauthorized hedge-trimming, and city boy Nick has to have the farmer’s thick accent filtered through two layers of translation before he can understand it. I’ve seen lots of British TV and movies, so I usually do okay with accents, but Gloucestershire accents aren’t easy. Maybe it’s because they’re so close to Wales. Also watch for a hysterical fight scene in a half-scale model of Sandford. For extra points, see if you can identify the actress playing Janine, the girlfriend who broke up with Nick because he was married to his job. And possibly a little too fond of his Japanese peace lily. Yes, that is a houseplant.
Three and three-quarter idols for this one. I had to dock a quarter idol for the horrific deaths, which just didn’t do anything for me, but it was a lot, lot funnier than I expected from those previews. The runaway swan (Elvis) is one of the best running jokes I’ve ever seen. I just want to know who the swan wrangler was, because I hear they can break a man’s arm. The moral of the story? Never judge by appearances. Also, never assume that a WWII sea mine is defused.