Megamind, Mega-hilarious

Megamind (****)

Director: Tom McGrath

Starring: Will Ferrell, Jonah Hill, Tina Fey, and Brad Pitt

MPAA: Rated PG for action and some language

Mega-hilarious. Watching movies like this all way give me a good feeling. I feel like there is hope, that when my children want to watch a movie there are clean, decent films out there that are smart enough to keep me entertained along with my five-year-old.

This was kind of a Shrek meets The Incredibles type of film. Super Villain Megamind (Will Ferrell) and Super Hero Metro Man (Brad Pitt) duke it out on the streets of Metro City, flinging witty banter and steel poles at each other. They have had this relationship since they were babies. But when Megamind’s master plan succeeds, he finds himself in way over his large blue head.

Will Ferrell is a talent who squanders his time on hopeless garbage like Step Brothers, when it is better spent making family fun like Megamind. He really manages to make this a fun and rewarding film. I was surprised by some of the little twists that come up. In general the film was an uproarious reboot on the super hero film.

I highly recommend this film. It is intelligent and witty. The voice cast meshed with expert animation, and a humorous, and different plot, really carry this movie as a fun Saturday afternoon flick.

Disney's Tangled (****)

Tangled (****)

Director – Nathan Greno, Byron Howard

Starring – Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi, and Donna Murphy

PG - Rated PG for brief mild violence

Disney is back with a fun family feature that really does feel like the next classic. This is a computer animated film designed to charm the youngsters but still hold the adult’s attention. Tangled is a visual and an emotional treat. Enough twists and turns exist here to keep the audience’s attention, but the run time is short enough for kids not to have to run to the bathroom too many times. There is some exciting action, and some really beautiful singing; all combined to make a great twist on the Rapunzel tale we all grew up with.

In Tangled we find all the elements of the Disney classics (fun musical numbers, animals with more human traits than some of the humans, and of course a very different twist to the original fairy tale) combined with the now standard computer animation like Shrek and Toy Story. Tangled however sets a new standard for Disney, after the flop Princess and the Frog. It is official, the old animation is out, and computer graphics are here to stay.

Rapunzel is a four star treat to take the whole family to. There is nothing too scary, and nothing inappropriate for any age. Hurry to the theater while you still can!

The Town - Affleck's Best

The Town **** (4 stars)

Director – Ben Affleck (Screenwriter)

Starring – Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, and Chris Cooper

MPAA - Rated R for strong violence, pervasive language, some sexuality and drug use.

Actor/Director/Screenwriter Ben Affleck rises to Scorsese level brilliance in the crime drama “The Town.” This is a brutal, profane, movie that delivers thrills better than “Heat.” Affleck has made a film here that will be difficult to ignore at the Academy Awards.

The Town is Charleston Massachusetts, the capital of bank and armored car robberies, and slum suburb of Boston. Amidst prostitution, drug and alcohol addiction, and a daily threat of violent death, lives Ben Affleck’s character Doug MacRay. His life is run by the local boss “The Flouriest” and he plans and runs bank heists with his buddies. While trying to dig himself out of the pile of refuse his life has become MacRay falls in love with a hostage from one of his bank robberies, Claire (Rebecca Hall – Frost/Nixon). Their lives become an entangled web as MacRay and his friends are the prime suspects in an FBI investigation.



Co-Starring as MacRay’s closest friend is Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) who plays a vicious murder parolee whose life is lived under the shadow of death at each step. Affleck and Renner make a dynamic criminal duo reminiscent of Affleck and Damon in Good Will Hunting. The characters all are living tragic lives, but there may be hope for redemption.



I might say this film is like Good Will Hunting meets Heat and The Departed. Take the twisted plots and high caliber acting, meld them together and you get The Town. This is not a film for the faint of hear. While the violence is not over the top it is realistic and brutal, the dialogue has an F-word for every minute of playing time, but the overall film is gripping and tense.

This is the kind of drama I live to see in the theaters; a film with excellent character and plot development, good script, top notch acting, and intense action. This is a first class action/drama, one that is guaranteed to thrill.

Sex/Nudity – 8 out of 10 – In a very quick shat we see a stripper spin on a pole, and we see a glimpse of one breast and then we see the exposed buttocks of a stripper. A woman straddling a man from the waist up they moan and we assume they are having sex. We see a man with his shirt off laying on top of a woman, they moan, we assume they are having sex.

Violence – 8 out of 10 – There is a lot of machine gun fire against innocent bystanders, police officers, and security guards. Quite a few people are shot, there is some blood. One man is hit repeatedly in the head with the butt of a gun, we find out later he is in ICU but okay. One man crashes into a car and dies, we see his bloodied head and body.

Profanity – 150 or so F-words, multiple uses of other profanities and religious exclamations.

Dark City Director’s Cut **** (4 Stars)

Director – Alex Proyas (Wrote and Directed)

Starring – Rufus Sewell, Jennifer Connelly, Kiefer Sutharland, Richard O’Brien, and William Hurt

MPAA – Rated R for violent images and some sexuality.

I never saw or even heard of this film until one day I was reading old movie reviews by Roger Ebert and I came across his review of Dark City. He loved it so naturally I had to see it. I popped it into the player and I was instantly hooked. This film might fall under film noir, but it also falls under Sci-Fi, murder mystery, and almost horror genres. Dark City is a wonderfully twisted film that seems to be part Truman Show, part Bourne, part Matrix, and part Inception. Intact this film probably made the Matrix trilogy and similar films a possibility.

Dark City is not the best movie ever made, but it is work of art. All the sets are done on an indoor sound stage, and everything is real. These are not computer generated sets; this is not a film that thrives on CGI. Of course there are some computer graphics at work here, but the vast majority of the film is wonderfully real. The film has a very distinct palette like, The Matrix, of greens and yellows. The sets and costumes are heavily influenced by 40s gangster and detective films, and while we assume it is a modern film it is difficult to tell.

Dark City is a film not to miss. It is a brilliantly crafted Sci-Fi thriller. This film delivers first class edge-of-your seat thrills. The graphics are a hair cheesy in one or two places, and the sound stage sets suspend reality a little bit, but the stages gave so much control to the director as far as lighting and sound goes that it works out to the film’s advantage. There are great twists and turns here plot wise, and while not everything is explained, the audience is not lost in the mystery. Dark city is an 8.5 out of 10 in my book.



Sex/Nudity – 7 out of 10 – A woman is seen changing into a robe and there is a brief glimpse of full frontal nudity. A dead woman is seen with one bare breast exposed in two scenes. A man is seen naked from the back.

Violence Gore – 7 out of 10 -There are a few scenes in which dead women are briefly shown with circular symbols carved into their skin. A few people die and their blood splatters quite a bit.

Profanity – 3 out of 10 – there were one or two mild profanities and not more than 10 religious exclamations.

Dinner for Schmucks

Dinner for Schmucks *** (3 Stars)

Director: Jay Roach

Starring: Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis, Bruce Greenwood, and Jemaine Clement

MPAA: Rated PG-13 for sequences of crude and sexual content, some partial nudity and language.

I haven’t laughed this hard since I saw “The Other Guys” earlier this month. I guess that isn’t saying much, but you have to realize I practically peed my pants at that movie, and at “Dinner For Schmucks” I left the theater with an aching body I had been laughing so hard and so long.

At first I thought Dinner for Schmucks was not one of those batty Saturday Night Live skit style films; but then I realized this is a movie directed by the man responsible for the Austin Powers series and the Meet the Parents films, both long SNL skits with SNL casts. Dinner for Schmucks takes what was funny about those films and combines it with the antics of comics Steve Carell and Paul Rudd to make a film that shook the theater walls with laughter.



Dinner for Schmucks is the beginnings of a hybrid between the classic SNL film style and the newer comedy style of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. While all these films have their roots in the slightly perverted sexual comedy Dinner for Schmucks manages to be considerably toned down compared to Austin Powers or Knocked Up.

This is still a wacky sort of comedy. The premise for the film is an odd buddy comedy matchup between the corporate ladder climber Paul Rudd and the lonely taxidermist and socially retarded Steve Carell. In order for Rudd to make his promotion at work he must bring an idiot to a work dinner. The purpose of these dinners is for the corporate guys to display their idiots for amusement.



While Rudd is bothered by the prospect of mocking innocent idiots he runs into (literally) Carell, whose special hobby is stuffing mice and using them to make vignette scenes such as The Last Supper. Rudd decides this is a sign and invites Carell to the dinner. What happens though is a long series of disastrous events with Rudd lying to his girlfriend, Carell inviting over Rudd’s personal stalker, and the star of Flight of the Concords Jemaine Clement’s bizarre cameo as out-to-lunch artist trying to steal Paul Rudd’s girl. This mix brought tears to my eyes as I tried to hold my guts in, I was laughing so hard.

What really works here is Steve Carell’s innocent character. This is not the
Michael Scott, the idiotic and rude social inept of The Office. This is a sweet, mild mannered and innocent man whose story is almost heart breaking; but whose incapability of normal social interaction causes more problems than Bugs Bunny to Daffy Duck. Carell is just so innocent though that anything he does is just passed off as “oh that poor man” instead of “what a moron”.



Dinner for Schmucks is a little bit of a dirty comedy. There are a lot of sexual jokes and profanity. However this is also one of the funnier films this summer. I’m giving this movie a solid 7.5 out of 10. The plot here is not brilliant by any stretch, but the characters are so wild and bizarre and the whole thing so entertaining it is a winner in my book.

Sex/Nudity – 6 out of 10 – There are a lot of sexual jokes and references. We see a picture of a woman’s bottom in skimpy panties with a message “are you touching yourself?” We see a man and two women being photographed they have only feathers covering their genitals and the woman have feathers over their breasts, the man invites two other men to have sex with him and the two women, the men decline the offer. There are a lot of cleavage revealing outfits as well.

Violence/Gore – 4 out of 10 – A man cuts off another man’s finger we see blood on the severed ends and a vulture takes the finger and flies away with it. A woman chases a man around an apartment in a playful way until he throws a blanket over her head and she fall over a railing, then she begins throwing bottles of wine at him.

Profanity – 6 out of 10 – 2 or 3 F-words, around 100 or so other obscenities and sexual references as well as religious exclamations.

The Ghost Writer, okay, but not what I wanted

The Ghost Writer

Director – Roman Polanski

Starring – Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan with Tom Wilkinson

MPAA - Rated PG-13 for language, brief nudity/sexuality, some violence and a drug reference.

The Ghost Writer plays like an Alfred Hitchcock style thriller from the 60’s but with much more interesting cinematography. Polanski knows how to direct a thriller without using bad teenage gimmicks like mutilated bodies or other horror shocks. Instead this is a thriller built piece by piece. Actions and dialogue stack on top of each other to the point that, along with a musical score that captures the heightened tension and strained emotions, as an audience we realize our hearts are pounding and our palms are sweaty. This is a tense political thriller/drama.



That being said The Ghost Writer is not an action film and has almost no violence. Anyone expecting gunshots and fistfights should go see something else. The Ghost Writer is a film about dialogue and names. If you can’t remember names I suggest the subtitles function because what is being said is vital to the plot.

I was kind of hoping for a blend of masterful thriller and wicked action, and I was a little disappointed by The Ghost Writer because of the lack of action. I was kind of hoping for something like The International which is a superb thriller, like The Ghost Writer, but also managed to have one of the best gun fights I have ever seen. But I can’t complain too much, this was an exciting film, although from the hype critics are giving it I was expecting a much more intriguing plot.

I really liked how the mystery was set up though. Ewan McGregor plays a ghost writer, a man who writes other’s memoirs. He is working on Adam Lang’s, the former prime minister of England. In the process he is led to the possibility that there are many more secrets to Lang’s administration than we suppose at the start. This is slowly discovered as the ghost writer talks to Lang and his wife, finding little inconstancies. The story looks pretty straightforward and then, as the music crescendos, everything falls apart.



I did not love The Ghost Writer. I wasn’t very impressed by the acting. With names like Pierce Brosnan and Tom Wilkinson supporting Ewan McGregor I was expecting something a little higher caliber, like Micheal Clayton or something, but you have to account for the fact that Brosnan and Wilkinson each had only 10 minutes of screen time. McGregor was just not that interesting to watch in this film. His performance, which the film hinged on, was a little wish washy, and he seemed not to have much direction for his character. For a 40 year old writer there was little development to his character.



All in all The Ghost Writer was a little bit of a letdown. I was expecting an Oscar worthy movie, and while I was still happy to see a visually appealing film, that was also a good thriller, I wasn’t impressed by everything that happened. I wanted more dynamic acting and a little more action or drama or something to pick up the pace a little. This is a decent film, 7.9 out of 10, but it is not as high caliber a film as I was expecting.

Sex/Nudity – 6 out of 10 – We see a fully nude man from the side, his groin is hidden by his leg and hip, he crawls into a bed with a naked married woman who slides on top of him and begins kissing him. They wake up the next morning in bed together and discuss the affair. There are a few references to a man’s affair with a woman, and we see a man from the chest up in a bathtub.

Violence/Gore – 4 out of 10 – A man is shot and we see a little blood on his head. A man is punched in the stomach and face. We hear the impact of a man being hit by a speeding car, but we don’t see anything. A newscast shows a terrorist being tortured by water being dumped on his face. A body is seen washed up on a shoreline.

Profanity – I heard one F-word, there might have been one more, and there were about 40 or so other profanities and religious exclamations.

The A-Team

The A -Team *** (3 Stars)

Director – Joe Carnahan

Starring – Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, and Patrick Wilson

MPAA - Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence throughout, language and smoking

Another underestimated summer remake, “The A -Team” turns out to be a fun pop-corn flick with lots of laughs and some good explosions. This rebooting of the old TV show is actually pretty entertaining and worth catching at a discount theater or at the video store when it is released. While I am too young to have seen any of the episodes – except a rerun or two at grandma’s house – I found “The A –Team” to be an exciting and witty film, one that I plan on renting in a few months to get a little bit more of the action.

Like I said I have not really seen enough of the old TV episodes to know if anything but the names are the same in this updated film, so I am going to try and judge this film on its merits as a movie and not as a faithful remake. “The A – Team” is kind of one of those guilty pleasure films. It is a movie that you have to go into with no expectations so you can just sit back and enjoy what happens.



The movie starts off with bringing the four Rangers together in their first mission wreaking havoc on a dirty Mexican general. Then we are fast forwarded “8 years and 80 successful missions” later to the Iraq war where the four are brought together to take on one very important and classified mission. It goes off without a hitch until they are double crossed and end up stripped of rank and in jail. From here they must break out and clear their names.

This movie manages to go pretty quickly from a heist film to a prison break film, back to a heist film and then over to a revenge flick fairly quickly without leaving us as an audience confused at all. The writing for the film wasn’t amazing, and this movie was far from not having any plot holes, but it was not a serious film, and no one was taking it seriously. Instead all the actors were just having a fun time messing around and being funny. Even the double crossing bad guy was kind of a goofball.

I really enjoyed the film’s casting. The actors were a lot of fun to watch and listen too. They took a mediocre script and managed to make it entertaining and lively. Bradley Cooper and Patrick Wilson both kind of stole the show for me. They are good looking guys who know how to make an audience laugh with their clever come-backs and wicked smirks. Wilson plays the CIA agent Lynch. He was kind of diabolical but very funny as he fumes at his incompetent CIA cohorts. Cooper was the smooth talking Face who got the girls and the good one-liners.



There was also really good chemistry between B.A. Baracus and Murdock (Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Sharlto Copley, respectively). The two kind of had a love/hate relationship. Murdock as the pilot has to deal with B.A.’s fear of flights and dopes B.A. up a few times, B.A. then threatens to “kill all you fools” until he is soothed as Murdock promises B.A his favorite cooked dinner. Copley’s half insane Murdock was a hilarious character whose bizarre antics and country accent made for a flavorful addition to the cast.

I can’t help but compare this film with “The Losers”, another action/comedy/buddy flick with pretty much the same plot. Notice that this summer has done a lot of the same movies over and over again. “Bounty Hunter”, “Date Night”, “Killers”, “Knight and Day”, all were pretty similar movies involving couples getting into trouble and then getting to blow stuff up. Then “The Losers”, “The A-Team”, and “The Expendable” all with a bunch of action gurus blowing more stuff up while being double crossed and having to clear their names. It is just funny to see the different studios all making the same movies.



Anyone who liked “The Losers” will for sure enjoy “The A-Team”. Both films are very similar and I enjoyed watching them. I don’t think I could pick a preferred film. Both had great one-liners and almost no plot to get in the way of all the action and laughs. These are perfect guy movies.

One thing that kind of bugged me with “The A-Team” was that some of the action was just too fast to see. The camera swung around quickly, blurring the scenes and it was impossible for me to catch what was happening to the characters. I prefer crisp clean action where I don’t lose track of whose who and what is going on. There were too many times where the action on screen just got fuzzy or too dark and it was hard to figure out what exactly was going on. On top of that a lot of the one-liners were masked by loud explosions and music. In theater they call it holding for laughs, and while movies are not theater there still needs to be a pause here and there for the audience to catch the jokes.


“The A-Team” delivers an overall entertaining if not simple movie. The plot and script are average and no one is going to the Oscars on this film. But because those involved with the film were able to take things lightly, and not get too serious with the movie, the whole thing was able to remain and energetic and exciting action movie that beats out a lot of the competition to date. I’ll tie this film with “The Losers” at 7.5 out of 10. Nothing exceptional was done here, but all in all it was a fun flick to watch.

Sex/Nudity 4 out of 10 – A man is seen shirtless a few times. It is implied that a man and a woman have had sex as a woman takes her panties off of a bed and puts them in her pocket. A man kisses a woman, she slaps him and they kiss passionately. A man admits to sleeping with another man’s wife. Some women wear cleavage revealing outfits.

Violence/Gore – 6 out of 10 – There are a lot of explosions, gun fights, fist fights, and killing. The action is stylized but still realistic. A lot of people are shot and punched some people die, but there is relatively little blood. No dead bodies are seen or anything like that.

Profanity – 5 out of 10 – 2 incomplete F-words (Mother F - then an explosion cuts them off), 3 military WTFs (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot), a few birdie flips, 2 or 3 B-words, 30 or so S-words, 50 or so mild obscenities and religious exclamations.