Reviews and More

The month of May comes to a close with a new No. 1 movie in America. The Disney/Pixar animated adventure Up raked in a whopping $68.2 million to topple Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian for the top spot at the box office. Featuring the voice talents of Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer, and Delroy Lindo among others, Up tells the story of an old man trying to fulfill a lifelong dream of seeing South America — by tying balloons to his house and floating there.

Battle of the Smithsonian had another strong week, adding another $25.5 million in ticket sales to bring its total gross to $105 million. Not bad for an absolutely crappy movie!

The only other new release to crack the top 10 was Drag Me to Hell. This horror/thriller starring Alison Lohman and Justin Long earned $16.6 million, good enough for third place.

Here’s the complete top 10 at the box office for the weekend ending 5/31/09:

1. Up, $68.2 million
2. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, $25.5 million
3. Drag Me to Hell, $16.6 million
4. Terminator Salvation, $16.1 million
5. Star Trek, $12.8 million
6. Angels & Demons, $11.2 million
7. Dance Flick, $4.9 million
8. X-Men Origins: Wolverine, $3.9million
9. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, $1.91 million
10. Obsessed, $665k

Most Holocaust movies I’ve seen focus on adults who are involved in some way, either as members of the SS guards, as part of a group devoted to protecting the Jews, or as victims of the genocide. I’ve never seen anything told from a child’s point of view, which is why I was intrigued by the premise of a 2008 film called The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Unfortunately, while the movie was very good in some parts, I thought it was highly unrealistic in many others — including the ending, which I didn’t like at all.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): The film is told from the point of view of Bruno (played by Asa Butterfield), an 8-year-old boy whose father Ralf (David Thewlis) is an important officer in the SS Guards during the height of World War II. Ralf has just been promoted, and the new position requires that the family move from their Berlin home to a house way out in the country. Bruno doesn’t want to go because he’ll miss his friends, but his mother Elsa (Vera Farmiga) and older sister Gretel (Amber Beattie) promise him that everything will be ok.

But Bruno is dismayed to find that the new house is almost completely isolated. There are no other homes near theirs, nor do there appear to be any other children around. In fact, the only signs of civilization that Bruno can see are the other SS officers who constantly come and go for meetings with Ralf, and a distant “farm” visible from his bedroom window. Bruno notices people out on the farm and asks his mother if he can go out there to play. Elsa is puzzled by what Bruno means, as she didn’t think there were any farms around. At any rate, she forbids him to leave the yard.

Being just 8, Bruno is of course easily bored, and soon finds a way to escape undetected from the yard. He goes exploring and eventually winds up at the farm, which viewers can readily identify as a concentration camp. There he meets a boy his own age named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), who is dressed in what looks to Bruno like striped pajamas, but which viewers instantly recognize as prison garb. Moreover, Shmuel is confined to camp grounds behind a barbed wire fence, another detail that Bruno can’t understand.

Despite these obstacles, the boys strike up a tentative friendship, with Bruno bringing Shmuel food and devising games for them to play even with the fence dividing them. The rest of the film follows this blossoming friendship as it takes a few twists and turns before the unexpected ending when Bruno’s actions have dire consequences.

My Reaction: This film was a bit too uneven for my tastes. On the one hand, I realize that everything was told from the point of view of an 8-year-old, but on the other hand some of Bruno’s actions still bothered me to no end and had me wondering if kids that age really are as clueless as he seemed to be. For instance, I found it strange that Bruno was savvy enough to sneak away from his house and go to the concentration camp, and intuitive enough to know to hide Shmuel’s food from his parents, yet naive enough not to know that Shmuel was in some kind of prison? Granted, Bruno might not have known what a concentration camp was, but surely he didn’t really think that Shmuel was wearing pajamas, right?

I do have to say that I appreciate the fact that the screenplay didn’t go for an easy cliché of an ending. I fully expected that Bruno would somehow smuggle Shmuel out of the camp and become lifelong friends or that he would end up saving the boy in some other way. I certainly did not expect that Bruno would join Shmuel in the camp and meet his death that way — which is not to say that I liked this particular ending, as I found it rather far-fetched. But it was better than going for happily-ever-after.

Overall, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was more disappointing than not. I think there was a chance to tell an emotionally-charged, touching story here, but the whole thing just fell flat in the end. I give it 5.0 stars out of 10.

Plot summary (with spoilers): Anne Hathaway stars as Claire Summers, a grief counselor who is called in the middle of the night by her boss Perry (played by Andre Braugher). There’s been a big plane crash, and Claire’s services are needed for the handful of survivors. Claire responds at once.

She starts a group therapy sessions for the survivors, who include Shannon (Clea DuVall), Dean (Ryan Robbins), and Eric (Patrick Wilson). The survivors all have different recollections of what happened prior to and during the crash, and Claire is determined to help them work out their memories to get everything straight. The task is made more difficult, however, by the near-constant presence of Arkin (David Morse), an ominous looking representative of the airline. He’s determined to write the crash off as pilot error, which Claire and the survivors think is merely a ploy to try to save the airline from a massive lawsuit.

Eric refuses to come to group sessions, so Claire decides to follow up with him on her own. She thinks that he’s exhibiting classic symptoms of PTSD, but he won’t listen to her, insisting that everything is fine. Eric also flirts constantly, and Claire eventually finds herself giving in and crossing that ethical line that exists between all counselors and their patients. But Eric is not really a patient, he reminds her, so they do indeed get it on.

Meanwhile, some of the survivors start disappearing from the group sessions without a trace. Perry thinks they probably just don’t want to come anymore, but Claire believes something more nefarious is going on. She thinks the airline is getting rid of the survivors in an effort to keep them quiet about the crash. She’s therefore determined to get to the bottom of what’s going on before anyone else disappears.

As the film winds down, viewers are presented with a “twist” that was telegraphed from a mile away — and even alluded to in official posters and trailers from the studio. But unlike The Sixth Sense, this twist served to cheapen everything that came before it, rendering what could have been a decent movie into the straight-to-DVD stinker it is.

My Reaction (spoilers again): You know, I simply don’t understand how a studio could green-light a project like this. Of course everyone who sees it is going to make the inevitable — and unfavorable — comparisons to The Sixth Sense. Anne Hathaway is a ghost and doesn’t know she’s dead??? That was the big, surprising, jaw-dropping twist? Yawn.

I didn’t get that line of reasoning at all. So the Dianne Wiest character was Claire’s long-dead aunt, but Claire conveniently “forgot” about that connection when Wiest was flitting in and out of her apartment? And Perry wasn’t really her boss, he was her second grade teacher, again in “disguise” while Claire was stuck between worlds? Huh? Wouldn’t it have been easier to get her to cross over if these two just revealed themselves for who they were? That makes no sense to me.

You know, this film would have been ok if it had been written as a straight thriller. I wish there were survivors and that the airline was trying to get rid of them to keep them quiet. That would have been infinitely more interesting than this ghost story angle. Oh, well.

I admire Anne Hathaway as an actress because she doesn’t always opt for the safest route. She definitely takes some risks, and sometimes they pay off for her (Brokeback Mountain, Rachel Getting Married), but occasionally they don’t. Passengers falls into this latter category. I give it 4 stars out of 10.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): Nick (played by Michael Cera), a high school senior, has recently had his heart broken by former girlfriend Tris (Alexis Dziena). He leaves her long, rambling messages on her cell phone, makes mix CDs for her, and takes “personal days” off from school in an effort to recover from the emotional pain.

One night, Nick’s friends and bandmates finally get him to leave the house. They have a gig at a small club, and then later, they’re going to try to find out where a popular indie band called Where’s Fluffy? will be playing a secret show in New York City. While at his own show, Nick sees Tris with another guy, which leaves him feeling even more down. But things change when Tris starts harassing classmate Norah (Kat Dennings) about apparently being at the show alone. Norah quickly says that she’s not alone, that she’s simply waiting for her boyfriend. When Tris presses the issue, Norah latches onto Nick, asks him to go along with whatever she does, and then kisses him.

After that, Norah’s friend Caroline (Ari Graynor), who is stupid drunk by this point, has to be taken home. Nick offers to help, so he, Norah, and Caroline pile into his Yugo. But when Nick’s friends see him with Norah, they seize the opportunity to help him finally get over Tris. They offer to take Caroline home so that Nick and Norah can try to track down the Where’s Fluffy? show.

From that point on, the film follows Nick and Norah on their various adventures during one long, rambling night in New York. It’s the kind of night that most high school students are familiar with, where you wander around aimlessly, try to hook up with friends, play phone tag, just barely miss running into each other, and encounter a number of weirdos and freaks while having one of the most memorable experiences of their lives.

My Reaction: I’d heard mostly mixed reviews about Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist before seeing the film, and now I understand why. There are some good things here, but some problems as well, so the project as a whole ends up being just average.

One of the things I liked was how the filmmakers captured what it’s like to be in high school and wander around all night with your friends, basically doing nothing. If you’re lucky, you’ve experienced at least one night like the one that Nick and Norah had. Maybe not exactly the same as far as the details go, but similar enough to find yourself nodding in agreement at many of the scenes.

But that’s also one of the biggest problems with the movie. It was so familiar that there wasn’t anything original about it at all. In a story like this, the characters need to be particularly strong, but neither Nick nor Norah fit that bill. Nick, like every single other character I’ve seen Michael Cera play is rather passive and dull, content to merely react to things rather than take control of any situation. Why he would have two good-looking girls fighting over him is beyond me. He wasn’t funny or charming at all, just completely bland. And Norah wasn’t much better. Perhaps that’s why they ended up liking each other.

Overall, I thought Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist was just ok. It’ll be familiar enough that you’ll want to keep watching because you’ll recognize a piece of your own life, but ultimately, the film doesn’t tell much of a story. I give it 5 stars out of 10.

I don’t know why, but I started watching some YouTube clips of the first season of Celebrity Apprentice the other day. I’ve never even watched a single episode of the regular Apprentice, so who knows why I looked at the celebrity version. For some reason it came up in my Recommended section, and since I was bored, I just clicked “play”.

Let me tell you, I fell in love with Piers Morgan almost immediately! I didn’t know anything about him prior to this, except that he was one of the judges in the infamous Susan Boyle video. But I thought he was absolutely fantastic in all the Apprentice clips I saw. Sure, he comes off as quite smarmy sometimes and seems like he’d be right at home selling auto insurance or something, but he actually proved to be quite savvy on the show. He used his contacts wisely, won 9 out of 11 challenges, and raised more than $500,000 above all the other contestants combined. And I just can’t get enough of his accent!

Anyway, I’m probably going to watch the entire series now. It ought to be available on DVD, right? Off to check!

Memorial Day weekend traditionally marks the start of the summer blockbuster season, so I was expecting some big grosses today, especially with Terminator Salvation on the list of new releases. And while the film did reasonably well with a $43 million haul, that was not enough to earn the title of No. 1 film in America — because it was beaten by Ben Stiller’s comedy Night at the Museum: Battle at the Smithsonian! The sequel to 2006’s Night at the Museum earned a whopping $53.5 million to beat all comers and claim the top spot on the list.

Last week’s champ, Angels & Demons, slipped all the way down to No. 4 after generating just $21.4 million in ticket sales, but its worldwide box office remained strong.

The only other new release to crack the top 10 was Dance Flick, a comedy from the Wayans brothers. This film managed to earn $11.1 million despite some truly horrid reviews.

Here’s the complete Top 10 at the box office for this Memorial Day weekend:

1. Night at the Museum: Battle at the Smithsonian, $53.5 million
2. Terminator Salvation, $43 million
3. Star Trek, $22 million
4. Angels & Demons, $21.4 million
5. Dance Flick, $11.1 million
6. X-Men Origins: Wolverine, $7.8 million
7. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, $3.72 million
8. Obsessed, $2 million
9. Monsters vs Aliens, $1.34 million
10. 17 Again, $1 million

I’ve finally decided which television shows I’m going to watch (and maybe recap) over the summer. Some of these shows will be on DVD, while others are currently on my TiVo because I didn’t have time to watch them when they were originally broadcast.

Actually, I wish I could transfer my TiVo shows to my brand new netbook and watch the programs out on my deck during this beautiful weather, but I’m not sure if my netbook has enough RAM to handle those videos. And since I’m not exactly in a financial position to buy memory just to be able to watch TV, I’ll let that idea pass for now.

Anyway, here’s what I plan to watch during the primetime hiatus:

• Boston Legal, Season 4 on DVD. I actually started this several months ago and am about four episodes in already.
• Burn Notice, Season 2 on TiVo. This show used to be one of my regular series when it was on during the summer, but as soon as it moved to Thursday nights, I had to stop because I already watch three other programs on that day. I’ll be picking up in the middle of season 2, from episode 12 or thereabouts.
• In Plain Sight, Season 1 on DVD. Watched a few eps, didn’t really like it, but have been convinced that the series gets exponentially better as it goes along, so I’m willing to give it another shot.
• Damages, Season 1 on DVD. I’ve heard some fantastic things about this show, but honestly, I’m 5 eps in and haven’t been blown away yet.
• Private Practice, Season 2 on TiVo. I watched the first 18 episodes of Season 2, and then gave up the show out of utter frustration. Other viewers, however, said that the season ends much, much better than it began, so I might give the remaining eps a whirl before I delete everything.
• Veronica Mars, Season 1 on DVD. This is a show I’ve been wanting to get to forever, but keep putting off for some reason. I’m determined to get going on the first season this summer!

This might seem like a heck of a lot of television viewing — and it is. But I need tons of content for this blog, especially since I don’t do my book reviews over here anymore now that I have the Fervent Reader site. I can’t very well go to the cinema every day, so I have to watch these TV shows instead!

Farrah Fawcett has been involved in a well-publicized battle with cancer since 2006. Until now, most of the stories have been told through the tabloids, and as a result, have either been inaccurate (like the Enquirer infamously saying that Fawcett wanted to die) or were published only after Fawcett’s personal medical records had been illegally accessed by UCLA Hospital staff members.

But with last Friday night’s airing of Farrah’s Story, a documentary filmed by those closest to Fawcett and produced by the iconic ’70s pinup girl, the general public finally got the real inside scoop of what Fawcett has been going through for three years.

The film shows the ups and downs that you’d expect to see from someone in this condition. Farrah’s highs include traveling to Germany for experimental treatment that rid her body of tumors and lesions at least for a short time, and gave her many more months than her UCLA doctors predicted.

The lows included Farrah’s near-constant pain from countless medical procedures, the devastating news that the cancer returned even after the experimental treatment, the loss of her trademark hair thanks to chemotherapy, and what will likely end up being a final goodbye with son Redmond, who was let out of prison for three hours for this purpose.

Farrah’s Story is an intense look at what Fawcett and life partner Ryan O’Neal have been through. My heart positively broke for Farrah when she realized that her hair was falling out. And I definitely lost it when Redmond came to say goodbye, mostly because at that point (which I think was maybe earlier this month), Farrah seemed pretty far gone. She was heavily medicated and/or sedated, and didn’t seem to even know who Redmond was.

Overall, I thought this was a very good documentary, as the viewer is with Farrah at every step of the way during her journey. I know some critics have come out against the film, saying that it didn’t do enough to let viewers know that early detection is key to this type of cancer. But this was called Farrah’s Story, not How to Detect and Treat Rectal Cancer, so their criticisms are unfair.

The whole documentary can be viewed online here on MSNBC in 11 parts. I highly recommend it.

Good luck with the rest of your fight, Farrah. You’re strong, and you’re determined to get through this. I wish you all the best!

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): The film opens with a drunken Luke (played by Paul Newman) cutting the heads off parking meters. He’s arrested, and then sent to a minimum security prison, where he has to learn to play by the rules — not an easy task for a “free spirit” like him.

As the new guy in the prison, Luke soon gets into various scuffles and differences of opinion. The most significant of these is when he crosses a man named Dragline (George Kennedy), who seems to be the leader of the other inmates. There’s a strict policy against fighting. The inmates can’t take it upon themselves to beat the crap out of each other, except on Saturdays when the guards put out boxing gloves for their use.

Dragline and Luke get into it, despite the fact that Dragline outweighs Luke by at least 40 pounds. Luke is easily beaten, but he refuses to give up or stay down. He keeps getting back up until Dragline gets tired of hitting him. The two become fast friends after that.

From there, we get numerous scenes of prison life, including the inmates’ work detail and the way they pass their free time by gambling and dancing. In one gambling incident, Luke says that he can eat 50 hard-boiled eggs in an hour — and does it… just barely.

Despite being sent away for only two years, Luke decides to try to escape the prison. The first attempt occurs soon after his mother dies, and he manages to stay away for a couple of months before being recaptured. Luke doesn’t fare so well the second time. Even though he’s unarmed and wiling to give himself up, he’s gunned down by one of the guards.

My Reaction: For me, Cool Hand Luke was one of those movies that I’d heard a lot about but had never seen. I mean, I never even saw a single scene as far as I can remember, never caught an airing on television or anything like that. I’d heard great things about it, and knew that it was one of Newman’s defining roles, so I decided to try it out recently.

I have to say that I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Perhaps the film was innovative for its time or something, and there were admittedly some interesting scenes (the hard-boiled egg bet immediately comes to mind), but taken as a whole, I thought it was pretty boring. How many scenes did we need to have of the men clearing the highway? Yeah, it was hard, dirty work. I got that the first time around, thank you very much.

And I seriously don’t get that Luke was supposed to be such a “cool” character. Why? Because he mostly rolled with the punches, said “Yes, Boss” when he had to and ate 50 eggs? Meh. This is supposed to be one of the all-time greatest characters in cinema? I guess I must have missed something (though I did notice all the Christ references. Are you kidding me??).

Perhaps I’m just too much of a modern viewer with unrefined tastes and a lack of appreciation for nuances in film. Because I thought Cool Hand Luke was boring and, well, pointless. I give it 4.0 stars out of 10.

Plot summary (with spoilers): The popular and progressive Pope has died, which means that a new Pope must be elected by the college of Cardinals. As a result, the most important figures in the Catholic church have descended on Vatican City to participate in the sacred rites of Conclave.

Meanwhile, at the CERN research facility in Geneva, Switzerland, someone has breached the building’s high-tech biometric security and stolen a small amount of antimatter, which scientist Vittoria Vetra (played by Ayelet Zurer) and her team had been working for years to create.

The scene then shifts to Harvard University, where symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is approached by a Vatican official requesting his help. Four cardinals, known as the preferiti, preferred ones, because they have the best chance of being elected Pope, have been kidnapped by the Illuminati, a secret society of “freethinkers” that was supposed to have died out long ago. Past Illuminati included such “radicals” as Galileo, Bernini, Rafael, and Goethe, men who challenged Church doctrine by insisting that science, not religion, could explain how the universe worked. The latest incarnation of the Illuminati have threatened to kill one preferiti per hour beginning at 8pm. Once all the preferiti have been disposed of, the highly unstable antimatter will explode, causing all of Vatican City and a significant portion of Rome to be destroyed.

From there, Langdon and Vetra race to follow ancient Illuminati clues to find their secret churches where the cardinals and antimatter are being held in order to save the men and recharge the antimatter casing batteries so the container can be safely returned to CERN. Langdon and Vetra are aided by Vatican City officials Inspector Olivetti (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Commander Richter (Stellan Skarsgård), as well as by the Carmelengo (Ewan McGregor), an official of the Papal Court.

My Reaction: I read the Dan Brown novel far too long ago to remember specifics and nitpick any changes the screenwriters chose to make. And I know there are tons of flaws in the film’s treatment of antimatter and its properties. But I’m not going to discuss any of that because I simply don’t know enough about it myself in order to refute what was presented. Instead, I’m just going to talk about the story I saw.

I thought Angels & Demons was far more entertaining than its (film) predecessor The Da Vinci Code. I think the “ticking bomb” plot device really helped this movie stay on track, as there were absolutely no wasted scenes along the way. The film clocks in at about 2 hours and 10 minutes long, but the time flies by quickly because the characters just race from one clue to another on their way to finding the cardinals and the antimatter.

I enjoyed the twist at the end, and have to admit that I was taken by surprise even though I had read the book. It was so well executed that even as the Carmelengo was being discussed as a possibility for Pope, I was like, “Wait, wasn’t he supposed to be the bad guy??” I didn’t know if the filmmakers had decided to put it all on Richter or not, so I was caught off guard there. And Carmelengo’s helicopter heroics looked very cool on screen, whereas in the book, the description sounded rather ridiculous.

The clues that Langdon and Vetra had to unravel here weren’t as interesting or jaw-dropping as those in The Da Vinci Code, but it was still fun hearing about what the Illuminati might have been up to. And even though I know Brown made up that last book of Galileo’s, I still had to shake my head at the thought of the Vatican giving such a rare and valuable text to Langdon. No way would that happen! (Yeah, yeah — no way would 99% of the rest of the movie happen either, but this point totally bothered me.)

Overall, Angels & Demons was a fun, entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. If you’re content to enjoy the action without feeling the need to nitpick everything that happens on screen, I think you’ll like this one. I give it 7 stars out of 10.