DVD Round-Up 4/1/09

A completely random assortment of DVDs here...

Role Models (2008)

I had heard that this Paul Rudd-Seann William Scott comedy was funny, but I hardly laughed at all when sitting in my living room. Maybe a movie theater experience was necessary. There were some funny lines, but they couldn't even create one funny scene. Rudd and Scott were okay, but lacked any type of charisma...dull as could be. As the head of the volunteer organization that Rudd and Scott were forced to join to complete some community service, Jane Lynch was completely wasted, forced to deliver the most ridiculous lines about drugs and phallic-shaped hot dogs. Kid actor Bobb'e J. Thompson (really Bobb'e...an apostrophe in your name?) is perhaps one of the most annoying people ever to grace the screen...the unfortunate thing was that in this poorly constructed movie, having a 12 year-old kid spout curse words was about the funniest thing it had going for it.

The RyMickey Rating: D

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Burn After Reading (2008)

There were some great actors here who all turned in some amusing work -- George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, and a particularly funny Brad Pitt -- but the writing-directing Coen Brothers team didn't really know what to do with them. There's definitely a story here -- McDormand and Pitt come across an innocuous computer disk that they believe contains secret government information and try to blackmail its owner -- but in the end, I didn't really give a damn about it or any one of the characters. Not bad, but certainly nothing you need to rush out and rent.

The RyMickey Rating: C

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Lakeview Terrace (2008)

It's cliché to even say it nowadays, but Samuel L. Jackson will do anything for a paycheck. As a racist L.A. cop, Jackson is pissed that an interracial married couple moved in next door, and if you've seen the classic Snakes on a Plane, you know not to mess with motherf'n Samuel L. Jackson. This movie was awful. It bills itself as a suspense, but nothing happened in this movie for 115 minutes and then in the last 10 minutes it follows things way too "by the book" to be suspenseful in the least. Throw in a ridiculous storyline about impending California wildfires (which I'm sure is some metaphor for racism or something) and this was one of the worst movies I've seen in years.

The RyMickey Rating: F

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Reservation Road (2007)

Not to be confused with one of my favorite movies of last year (see review here), this Road movie is actually just as depressing, but ultimately not as good. The film starts out stunningly as the young son of Joaquin Phoenix (pre-rap artist crazy) and Jennifer Connelly is killed in a horrific hit-and-run car accident. Mark Ruffalo is the man who killed him, and he is wracked with guilt. When the police fail to find the killer, Phoenix attempts to take things into his own hands. The first 30 minutes of this one were utterly gripping. My eyes were literally welling up over the grief that was depicted onscreen. But then things got a little kooky...there were way too many coincidences and odd connections and too much time with Phoenix sitting in front of a computer. Despite my problems with the film which definitely falters in the final 45 minutes, the acting and story in the first half is too good to miss.

The RyMickey Rating: B

DVD Round-Up

Here's a trio of "foreign" flicks...some of which are better than others...

I've Loved You So Long (2008)

If only this movie were a little shorter, it certainly would've ranked in the top five of 2008 movies I had seen. Nevertheless, this French film is definitely a winner because of two great female performances. Kristin Scott Thomas is Juliette, a woman who was imprisoned for fifteen years for murdering her son, and Elsa Zylberstein is Lea, Juliette's sister who longs to create a relationship that has been missing for so many years. These two actresses are really just amazing...how neither of them got Oscar nominations is beyond me. Like I said, it certainly lulls in parts, but the revelation that occurs at the end was shocking to me and threw a whole new perspective on the movie and Thomas's performance in particular.

The RyMickey Rating: B+

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Let the Right One In (2008)

I don't know if I've ever seen a Swedish movie before, but I can be certain that I've never seen a Swedish vampire movie. Definitely different, the film is good, but not as great as the raves it was getting at the end of 2008 (it showed up on many Top Ten lists). Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a twelve year-old boy who is constantly bullied at school and finds some solace in Eli (Lina Leandersson), an odd girl who just moved into his apartment complex. Perhaps the reason she's so odd is that she's actually a vampire. The film focuses on some vampire lore that I've never seen before in movies and it's certainly not the least bit scary (although there is bloodsucking, but what would a vampire flick be without bloodsucking?). Although the two young leads are stellar (I really can't say enough about the two of them...they were great), the relationship set up between them feels way too adult. There were scenes between the two of them that made me incredibly uncomfortable...they were much more, for lack of a better word, sensual than anything I've seen in any American flick. Add to that uncomfortableness, the director paces the film incredibly slowly. There were definitely whole scenes that could've been removed to make it flow better. Nevertheless, not a bad movie and certainly a different movie. Worth a rental if the general idea of the film intrigues you at all.

The RyMickey Rating: B-

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Australia (2008)

This is likely the only one of these three movies that most people have heard of and it's by far the worst of the three. Unfortunately for the film, I'm liking it less and less the more time passes after watching it. Nicole Kidman is awful in this. Wide-eyed and oddly theatrical, I laughed at her when I shouldn't have. As far as Hugh Jackman goes, he was serviceable in his role, but he was nothing special. I (used to?) appreciate Baz Luhrmann as a director, but his goal to produce an "epic" film fell tremendously flat. The film veers from over-the-top in the first thirty minutes to way too serious in the last hour (with a crazed villain thrown in for good measure) and he never finds an appropriate balance. The film is a simple love story between two unlikely people and there's not enough story to last 165 minutes. Plus, the film seriously could've ended an hour earlier. The whole war saga at the end was completely and utterly unnecessary. I remember that when we first got the movie at the theater, the film broke, we had to pass the theater, and people asked me, "How much of the film was left?" I said, "At least an hour," and they said, "Really? It seemed like it was ending." Well, it could've ended after 105 minutes...in fact, Baz even throws in a montage and voice-over narration that you might expect to see at the end of a movie, but he then makes it go on for over an hour more. My appreciation for Baz certainly lessened after watching this one.

The RyMickey Rating: D+

DVD Round-Up

A quick round-up of movies available on dvd that I've watched in the past few weeks. I won't do full reviews for these (unless I really, really like them, at which point it'll be in a separate post) -- just trying to convey whether they're worth a rental or not. Here they are, in order from best to worst.

Ghost Town (2008)

A charming comedy. It felt very old-school to me, like it could've been made in the 40s or 50s. Ricky Gervais is a man who dies for six minutes during a colonoscopy and when he awakes, he can see dead people. Greg Kinnear co-stars as one of the ghosts and Téa Leoni is a possible love interest. The flick also features a hilarious "cameo" from Kristin Wiig, one of Saturday Night Live's only bright spots nowadays. What I liked about this one was that it didn't utilize all the same-old, typical romantic comedy clichés. Even the ending was pleasantly different than what one expects from the genre.

The RyMickey Rating: B

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Traitor (2008)

A nice little thriller starring Don Cheadle as a man who is either working for the FBI undercover or working for a Muslim terrorist organization. Action sequences in this one were subdued, but still very tense. My problem with this one is only that it seemed very preachy about trying to get across the point that "not all Muslims are terrorists." I feel like they even said those exact words once. While entirely true, I don't need that pounded into my brain multiple times during a movie's 110 minute running time. Still, worth a rental for sure.

The RyMickey Rating: B

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Eagle Eye (2008)

What started out as a great little thriller royally blew it in the final act. Shia LaBeouf stars as a man on the run from some unknown entity that has seemingly framed him for some crime he didn't commit (very North by Northwest, for you Hitchcock fans). The lovely (but rather empty and vacant) Michelle Monaghan is Shia's co-star who is in the same boat as him. Like I said, the final act was a bust...incredibly disappointing and preposterous, ruining any type of recommendation for a rental here.

The RyMickey Rating: C-

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Mamma Mia (2008)

Seriously, the worst movie of 2008 that I saw. Awful, awful stuff. It's not easy to direct a musical, but even I know that you can't be jumping up and down and dancing in slow-motion while singing at a normal pace. The ABBA songs were just thrown in willy-nilly and the singing, for the most part, was adequate at best. The sets looked awful and the story was really just disgusting. "Hey, my mom was a slut when she was younger and I don't know who my dad is! Yippee! Let me get married and invite the three possible dads to the wedding, thus allowing my mom to reminisce with her two equally slutty girlfriends about their slutty escapades in their slutty youth!" Really, just vomit-inducing. The only saving grace was relative newcomer Amanda Seyfried (as the daughter) who tried her very best to rise above all the dreck. But even she can't save this one from the rating I'm about to give it.

The RyMickey Rating: F