Ed's Review Dot Com

Summit Entertainment, Touchstone Pictures, Offspring Entertainment

Rick Malambri, Adam G Sevani, Sharni Vinson, Alyson Stoner, Keith Stallworth, Kendra Andrews, Stephen Boss, Martin Lombard, Facundo Lombard, Oren Michaeli, Joe Slaughter

The new gangs I guess are street dancers.  The Pirates including Luke (Malambri) and Natalie (Vinson) team up with a kid the see dancing on the street named Moose (Sevani) and try to take on the number one champion hip hop dancers in New York in contest.  They need the money, and they need the respect.  The showdown of the century “The First Annual World Dance Jam” is destined to change their lives forever.

Yeah, right!  I hated this film.  I don’t get the modern street dancing anyway.  I’m much too old to enjoy seeing people flip-flopping around on the floor like a fish out of water or a chicken with his head cut off.  Then the dialog in this film is enough to make me choke!  “One move, can make you believe there’s something more.  One move, can set a whole generation free.”  Gak.

I did not see this in 3D.  I understand the 3D process added a lot to dance fans and I watched it on DVD.  But I was bored to death.  Practice-battle-fight-battle-practice-battle-battle-battle-done.   There was no story at all, just a bunch of kids who live and practice in a big building and do dance battles at every time they meet somebody.  There was just nothing going on here at all.  I was horribly bored with the whole thing, and the climax was about as boring as the rest of the film.  The Pirates got their butts kicked 900 ways to Sunday and then the judges without any question just name the Pirates the winners.  Like there wasn’t really any real contest to begin with.  And the commentary by the announcer was really lame!   On and on with stunning insight like “Did you see that?” “Ooh, that’s old school” “Say what?”
This was a waste of my time!

Note: My better half is a big fan of “So You Think You Can Dance”. At least one of the stars of this movie is from that show. She was thrilled to recognize someone from the show, then promptly fell asleep. The next day we tried to watch it again, but she was as bored with it as I was.

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CD2 Films, Mad Choice, Polymorphic Pictures

James Marsden, Nick Nolte, Christina Applegate, Katt Williams, Bette Midler, Neil Patrick Harris, Sean Hayes, Wallace Shawn,  Roger Moore, Joe Pantoliano, Michael Clarke Dun can, Chris O’Donnell, Jack McBrayer, Fred Armisen, Kiernan Shipka

The battle between Cats and Dogs has been going on for centuries.  But in this war, one feline took it a step too far.  Kitty Galore, formerly an agent for MEOWS (a cat spy organization) has gone rogue and has a plan to bring her canine enemies under her power, but also to take down the rest of the cats, and rule the world of cats and dogs herself.  She uses and evil invention (a low frequency signal only dogs will react to) to turn dogs into her own personal slave robots.  They must do what she says.  She had an ugly hairless cat henchman sent off on a the quest to conquer the world.  The rest of the cats and the dogs have to band together to try to overthrow her and save mankind!

I really did not like this movie at all.  I didn’t think any of it was really funny, and although they had tons of stars lending their voices to the characters, there story is really bad.  They are mostly puns.  Roger Moore’s character, for example, is named Tab Lazenby.  How cute.  Make fun of another Bond actor.  The plot is like a bad “Pinky and the Brain” epsiode, except that Pinky and the Brain was somewhat funny, and only lasted about 15 minutes at a shot.  Truly I would much rather attend a Phineas and Ferb marathon that this film! It would be much, much more entertaining.   It was so boring that I could hardly make it through.   Seriously, 1950’s Saturday Morning adventure cartoons were more interesting than this stuff.  The original Cats and Dogs came out a decade ago.  What happened in the 9 years that have passed since then?  Why this stinky sequel?  I don’t think a little kid would be able to enjoy this film.

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Anvil Films, Aramid Entertainment, Capitol Films

Helen Mirren, Joe Pesci, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Gina Gershon, Taryn Manning, Scout Taylor-Compton, Ling Bai

This film starts awful and gets a little better as it goes on.  But not that much better.  It’s very loosely based on the true story of Joe and Sally Conforte.  These are the real names.  But in this film we call them  Grace and Charlie.  They bought and ran the famous Mustang Ranch in Nevada, a legal brothel, but not for very long.   Grace runs the business, and Joe is a true promoter, and rescues a deeply in debt gambler/boxer from Argentina.  The idea was to promote him as a boxer and make more income from his efforts.  Meanwhile,  Charlie can’t keep his mitts off the working women, and the idea of what their marriage is seems lost on him.  Until Grace leaves and then things go haywire.  Eventually the IRS comes in to make quick work of them.   The story is harsh, so it has an R rating, but it’s not too bad.  Pesci’s language is what makes him, and he can cuss a storm like the best of them.   So we get to enjoy that.  Of course Helen Mirren is a class act, and so the acting goes pretty decently even with the lack of script.  Gina Gershon is not in a big role here, but she does a great job with what she does.

Basically it’s hard to keep focused on this film and it’s be panned by critics everywhere.  The film has a bit of conflict over whether it’s 2009 or 2010, but it was actually filmed in 2008, so who knows.  The release was so small that it’s nearly, but not quite a direct to video endeavor.  That may be there reason for the conflict on the date.

All in all the film is pretty boring, especially the first hour, and the ending is really just told, not shown, so it is a bit anti-climactic.  It has it’s moments, but my view is that it’s not worth your time.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

Sony Pictures Classics, Likely Story, Feelin’ Guilty

Rebecca Hall, Elizabeth Keener, Elise Ivy, Catherine Keener, Josh Pais, Sarah Stelle, Ann Guilbert, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt

OMG!  This is one of those films where they just go out into a room and turn on the camera and come back the next day to see what they got.  Well, maybe not quite that bad, but there is no story here.   Just a LOT of character development for no real purpose.

Two orphan girls are taking care of their elderly grandmother.  One is a bitch, and the other a wimp.   The grandmother lives on the same floor from two ratty characters who make a living out of buying dead people’s stuff and reselling it at a HUGE profit.  The husband doesn’t care, but the wife is feeling guilty so she tries to make it up, sort of, by doing dumb stuff like handing out $20.00 bills.   Then the have a daughter who is a pain in the butt.

The grandmother is also a pill, so there are plenty of people to dislike here.   The couple is waiting for the old lady to die so they can buy her apartment, knock down the wall, and make their apartment bigger.

Big deal.  The whole movie is watching these people parade around and not care in the least what happens to them.  This is surely one of those “artsy” films that you’re supposed to watch and mutter “brilliant” at every scene.  But instead you yawn and wonder why you’re still watching.

There are some good actors in this film, and it could have been a decent story, but I just found it incredibly boring.  I have seen “a day in the life of” movies and enjoyed them, but this one was awful.  They call it a comedy, but there was almost nothing to even make you smile.  I don’t think I’d like to meet the folks that rated this film 5 stars and call it “the funniest movie I’ve seen in years”.   They must have watched a different movie altogether!

I don’t know whether to call this a comedy or a drama, so I suspect I’ll call it both, but neither.

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Michaels-Goldwyn, Relativity Media, Rogue

Will Forte, Val Kilmer, Kristen Wiig, Ryan Phillippe, Maya Rudolph, Powers Boothe

Oh my, I was a bit afraid going in, and my worst fears were realized.  It’s an amazingly bad movie.   MacGruber is a one joke spoof that thinks it’s a tribute.  It was really funny when they did it on SNL.  MacGruber, the unflinching super hero who can fix a rocket with a rubber band and a paperclip, and can disarm any bomb using his mind power.  Then repeat it in as many situations that are different locations with the same ending.  MacGruber gets distracted and kaboom.

Well the sketch is starting to wear thin.  They are doing things like putting Betty White in it as MacGruber’s grandmother to distract him while he blows everybody up.  Still funny?  Well, a little bit.   But a sketch does not a movie make?   What can you do?  Make it bigger with bigger explosions, and add back story to try to fill in the blanks.

Well, it doesn’t work.  I love Will Forte, and he’s one of my favorites on SNL for his range of characters and humor.  I’m a bit Wiig’d out (doesn’t it seem like instead of SNL it ought to be called  “The Kristen Wiig Show?), lately by overuse of Kristen in every skit, but she is talented.

So why did this movie FAIL big time?  Well, they took themselves a bit too seriously, and that blew it.  In something like Austin Powers, there were strong characters and it was pure tongue in cheek.   Here, they didn’t go the “Police Squad/The Naked Gun” route with a Frank Drebbin who is a likable screw-up who had a heart of gold.  MacGruber is an ass.  He’s about as unlikeable as they come.  The jokes (?) are rarely even worth a chuckle, and dancing naked with a stalk of celery stuck in your butt cheeks is about as “funny” as it gets here.   There is a certain group out there who really defend this movie to the depths, but I was really disappointed.   There have been a lot of SNL to Feature Movie failures, but this rates up there with the worst of them.  I really think this will be forgotten and filed in the dusty part of the library next to “It’s Pat!”

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog