against the dark

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1194271/

against the dark opens with a lame voiceover that lays out the exposition and then goes downhill from there.  why was steven seagal even in this?  he delivers a couple epic lines at wildly inappropriate times and hacks at some zompires.  they could have filled this role with just about anybody.  carrot top?  sure, why not.  i am confident that carrot top could play a paper-thin character at least as well as steven seagal.

the other--well, *one* other--thing that bothered me was that the female characters did not do anything other than walk around and wait until it was time to die/scream/escape.  i would be writing an indignant treatise on the subject of objectification right now, except that they objectified every single character in the script, including steven seagal, which makes me think it is less a matter of objectification and more a matter of crappy writing.  also, when did they find the time to do their hair?  take a tip from your pal schmolli: when the apocalypse comes, you are going to want to do something with your hair that is easy to maintain and does not impede your combat capabilities.  bald is beautiful, baby.  you need to cover your noggin, get a hat.

against the dark gets one wasted hour of my life.  literally!  i applied the skip-forward button to the benefit of all.

iron man 3

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1300854

more like iron man 2, part 2.  which is basically what i expected.  superhero movies come in two flavours: origin story and daily grind.  the first movie is generally the origin story, and the rest of them are daily grind, unless you go back and redo the origin story.  the origin story is where the bulk of the character development usually happens; it is where the superhero encounters all the change which guides them to choose to become a superhero/supervillain.  the daily grind, on the other hand, might feature new gadgets/superpowers, but does not change much about the character's core.  sometimes they try to invoke the origin story magic by having the superhero give up on being a superhero, then decide to become a superhero again, but it never seems as interesting as a real origin story.  the iron man series has done a fine job of trying to do character development in the daily grind stories, but they are still daily grind stories.

iron man 3 shows a troubled tony stark wrestling with his experience from the avengers, but it was not clear to me what the problem was, exactly.  it seemed that they meant to show he was hiding behind his armor or that he was thinking that the armor itself was iron man, and that his big character development was in casting off the armor and coming to realize that *he* is iron man.  that is all very well and good, but it is not clear to me how that follows from the events of the avengers.  i am also completely confused about why he blew up all his robots; they were perfectly good robots, and he is just going to have to go build more of them.

anyway, i did not find the character development that enthralling.  the special effects and action and one-liners were well-executed, if standard, action movie fare. iron man 3 gets three prehensile robots.

now you see me

[IMDB] [Amazon]

for a movie where the oft-repeated theme is to draw you in close so you cannot see the big picture, they sure did a terrible job of disguising the big plot twists.  i want to say something positive about the magician caricatures, but i want to say something equally negative about everybody else.  this was otherwise some pretty standard, if flashy, confidence movie fodder.

now you see me gets two...wait, where did they go?

goon

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1456635

goon is a movie about one thing: relationships.  and winning.  and sticking up for your team.  and how youth and strength can beat out old age and treachery. and how it is ok to be a creepy stalker if the stalkee turns out to be into it.  there was some hockey in there too, but this is not a movie about hockey. I do not think anybody makes movies about hockey because it is a lot cheaper and easier to just film some people playing hockey and call it a game.

there is one scene in this film that somewhat haunts me. it is the one where the old dog and the new dog meet in a diner in the middle of the night and talk about what they do for their teams. "if my team needs me to bleed, I bleed." that scene. it bothers me a lot that the old dog starts with the attitude that his team only values him for his ability to bleed and then switches to blind subservience to the good of the team by the next scene. serving the team is important, no doubt about it, but failing to understand that the team is not itself a thinking thing which gives a rat's ass about you is just naive. it takes very special, very specific training and focus before you can start thinking about your team that way without being completely wrong.

so anyway. between that and the creepy stalker thing, goon earned itself one Angus-the-creepy-stalker doll.

hit and run

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2097307

bradley cooper is still not samuel jackson.  tom arnold is still not funny.  kristen bell is still not playing characters that are not insipid.  there, see how bad this movie was?  it has only inspired me to say mean things about people i do not know, who probably all tried really hard to make some nice entertainment for you, except it did not happen to work out.  is that a crime?  no, of course not.  but maybe it should be.

hit and run is a comedy that looks sideways at you after every punchline to see why it is you are not laughing.  like pennywise the clown, except that pennywise was funny, in between gruesome mutilation/murders.

just to be crystal clear, the comparison there had the sadistic child-slaughtering clown coming out on top.

the only part i liked about this film was the inspirational thing the guy told the girl, but you can see that in the first two minutes, then shut off the show and go on with your life.  i think that is the way they should have packaged it.  editing this movie down to a 45 second inspirational youtube clip would propel it from a two star meh-fest into a thumbs-up-and-share.  you could twitter it at all your friends, then bookface it to your myspace.  yahoo!

hit and run gets two mehs.