Archive for May, 2012

Battleship Delta Productions, Bluegrass Films, Film 44,

Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker, Liam Neeson, Tadanobu Asano, Gregory D. Gadson, Hamish Linklater, Peter MacNicol, Jesse Plemons

This starts out as the story of two brothers. Commander Stone Hopper (AlexanderSkarsgard) is a crack naval officer and big brother to serial screw-up younger brother Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) who Stone is tired of bailing out of trouble, so he demands he join the Navy and serve with him to straighten out his life. In the middle of a huge international Naval war games exercise, they figure out that the earth has been attacked by a cluster of alien ships and the fate of the world is in their hands. These guys are in the fight of their lives as blindly they have to attempt to pick off the enemy ships based on their coordinates, in this big screen version of the classic board game.

This was a surprise to me. The previews made it look like another Transformer movie, but though the premise is rather simple, they pulled it off for me for one major reason. This movie was FUN! I had fun from start to the remarkable finish. Now scientifically you can poke holes in this film all throughout, and the possibility of pulling this off is rather slim, but this film is made to entertain, not enlighten. If you’re looking for a bunch of fun kicking ET’s butt (to quote Will Smith from Independence Day). Even the presence of Rihanna couldn’t dampen the excitement of this film which is just made for a big screen.

The special effects and explosions are awesome, and great fun to watch, and the excitement is good and keeps you interested from beginning to end. It’s a fantasy battle movie that just seemed to click for me. Not as good as MIB3 or The Avengers, for sure, but if you have room for another great evening of Naval battles and strategy mixed with alien ships and big explosions, I really enjoyed watching this film and glad I added in one more movie night this week.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

 

 

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Movie Rentals Releasing Tuesday May 29, 2012

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Amblin Entertainment, Hemisphere Media Capital, Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ,

Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emma Thompson

An alien being, Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) who is the last of his race, is trapped in a specially built prison on the moon gets a little help from a special cake and escapes, travels back in time to kill Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) back in 1969 in order to prevent his race from being decimated when they failed to conquer the earth. Agent J (Will Smith) has to go back in time to meet up with Agent K as a young man (played by Josh Brolin) to save the Earth.

This film totally blew me away! I really expected that this movie would suck. After all, Neither J or K is very young anymore, and MIB has been done before. But this film was so much fun. It was very, very clever, and extremely funny. Top that off with a really tense story that does build the suspense. I love these characters! They are so well developed by this time, and the humor just flows from scene to scene. There is all kinds of humor, from clever puns to slapstick to very sophisticated setups. I thoroughly enjoyed the humor part of this. But Will Smith shocks you with a surprise sad moment that is a “Marley and Me” moment that made a few of our party shed a tear. There are some other surprise characters too that add a lot to the film.

Now this film is going to have haters. They’re going to yell that’s it’s over the top. Well of course it’s over the top. It’s an MIB movie! There really is not a division of the federal government that went around erasing people’s mind, nor are all models really aliens. (Well maybe that’s true, but the rest isn’t). But if you are a fan of the original MIB, and disappointed in MIB 2, they nailed it with this one. Others complain that it’s all been done before, and this adds nothing. To that I say that it really fills in the history of why K chose J and a great back story that explains why they are like they are. This added a great deal to the story. To me, this was an excellent close to the trilogy. Great job guys.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

 

 

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Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, Kennedy Miller Mitchell,

Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Pink, Hank Azaria, Sofía Vergara, Common, Carlos Alazraqui, Elizabeth Daily

Mumble (Elijah Wood) is back as the tap-dancing penguin who can’t sing in the 3D sequel to the original Happy Feet. Mumble now has a son who inherited his fathers non-talent for singing and he hates to dance. When a disaster happens shaking the world, Mumble and his son and some friends are on one side of an ice cliff, while the rest of the flock is trapped in an ice bowl with no food and no way out. Using some penguin ingenuity and some surprising new friends (including an amazing flying penguin) they do their best to try to rescue the rest of the crew. Meanwhile, there is some good music and Mumble’s kid learns to like dancing!

This film was cute, and is exactly what you would expect it to be, whether that’s good or bad. The problem is that though it’s cute and has some great voices, the story if fairly ho-hum. The original was really fresh and original. This is a sequel so we’ll not really be surprised. There are moments when it sort of drags on. One saving grace is the musical numbers which are pretty good. The younger folk will love it, and it’s not a bad family film for a DVD night, so it’s definitely worth the rental if you have kids, but it didn’t do well in the box office because there was no real reason for the 3D, and the story itself is really nothing new. There wasn’t any real suspense, so their shenanigans while attempting to rescue the gang wasn’t edge of your seat stuff in any way. But cute it is, and something you can watch with your kids that’s not all that bad.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

 

 

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Relativity Media, Bord Scannan na hEireann / Irish Film Board,

Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Mathieu Kassovitz, Michael Angarano, Anthony Brandon Wong

Mallory Kane (GIna Corano) is a bad assed black ops agent who’s due for a break, but is suddenly sent to Dublin on a top secret mission to bring back an enemy agent. When she arrives, she’s upset to think that they sent her out to play eye candy for another agent just to distract their target, but instead she’s been betrayed and setup up, and her life is practically worth nothing. Someone inside the agency has set her up, and it takes all her skills to get away. But later she has to track down who set her up and why.

This is a bit of a ho-hum action film in my opinion. I’ve seen a lot similar to this, so it’s not really original. The last half hour of the film is actually the best as she returns home to her father (Michael Douglas) for help and finds an unwelcome welcoming. With Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Douglas, and directed by Stepven Soderbergh, it ought to be unbelievable, but if it was, it was in a bad way. No one has a very big par, and mostly it’s either contrived “Jackie Chan style” jumping off buildings and extreme chases, or huge fight scenes. Essentially, they just gave Gina Carano a huge all star cast, and set her off to beat the crap out of the cast, one by one. The story is non-existent, and I think it’s supposed to be that way, sort of like “Kill Bill” with all action and no story, but I just didn’t feel there was enough for me to highly recommend this one. If you’re a fan of tough girl films, then this gal is pretty tough, but I’m not a fan of the WWF which it appears that this film emulated.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

 

 

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