The Raven (2012)

I’d Rather Stand.  It Makes it Easier to Leave!

The October Horrorthon causes me to do a lot of random movie watching, usually with random jaunts through the Netflix instant library.  That’s what happened with today’s movie.  Oh, I was aware of it, but there was no interest on my part.  I’d seen nothing of interest related to it, and the 23% it landed on Rotten Tomatoes certainly wouldn’t improve that.  But what would my October Horrorthon be without at least SOME crappy movies, right?  And I could at least say I was interested in the subject matter of the movie since it’s vaguely about the only poet I like.  So let’s talk about The Raven, written by Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare, directed by James McTeigue, and starring John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve, Sam Hazeldine, Brendan Gleeson, and Kevin McNally.

Inspector Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) investigates a series of murders that eerily resemble a short story called “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack).  After later finding the body of one of Poe’s rivals cut in half in reference to “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe is brought in for questioning.  Together Poe and Fields decide that someone is copying Poe’s stories, but the reason is unclear.  Poe becomes involved when his fiancée Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve) is kidnapped and the note left in her place demands that Poe publish a new story else her death be on his head.

Oh my God!  The story of this movie was so good it was Shakespearean!  …But only because that was one of the writer’s last names.  This movie was not very good, and really all parts of the movie contributed to it.  It wasn’t written well, it didn’t look good, and the performances were lackluster.  When I started watching this movie I was wondering if I should’ve brushed up on my Edgar Allan Poe beforehand.  The only ones I could remember were the one about the bird, the one about the heart, and the one about the cask of booze.  After watching the movie, I felt like I probably should’ve brushed up on my Seven, because this movie seemed like it really wanted to be that movie.  It has a lot of elaborate deaths based on books and a mystery that turns out to be a guy you wouldn’t really expect, but that’s about as close as those comparisons go.  For instance, Seven was good.  This movie drops lines like, “Shut it or I’ll shut it for you,” from the killer.  Y’know, for someone that reveres Poe’s works so much, you really haven’t mastered his ability with the English language.  And it didn’t really turn out to be too necessary to remember Poe since they did only a few of his greatest hits.  “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” there were some Ravens flying around, and there was someone buried in a wall.  At a certain point the killer loses his flair for the dramatic and just starts killing people in more conventional ways.  I don’t think Poe wrote that many books with things as mundane as slitting the neck of a policeman and shooting another in the arm.  Did you waste all your money on that elaborate pendulum gag?

Speaking of which, I found myself wishing the movie had spent even a portion of the money they must’ve used making that pendulum device on special effects.  The pendulum thing looked fairly cool, but then it hit the body at the bottom and sprayed some of the fakest blood computers can make.  I guess they did alright with some of the cadavers, but it seems like almost any movie can pull those off nowadays.

None of the performances seemed that interested in participating with the movie.  I can’t really blame them.  John Cusack kind of mailed the whole thing in.  Who knows?  Maybe he did a lot of research and that’s how Poe actually acted.  I would’ve always thought that Poe was smart enough to not draw the conclusion that he should feel in any way responsible for these deaths.  You just wrote some poems!  If someone starts killing people based on my reviews, I’m not going to feel like their blood is on my hands.  I mean, I’m not saying that they should kill Kristen Stewart or Miley Cyrus or anything, but if they did the world would keep turning, you know what I’m saying?  And I certainly wouldn’t feel bad about it.  If they police came to me about it, I suppose I could be persuaded to stop writing for a time, but really this is their responsibility to catch the murderer.  Let’s not drag me into this game.  Luke Evans did okay as the policeman that was working with Poe, and he should definitely be given credit for being able to link the girl stuffed in a chimney to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”  I barely remember that story so I would automatically start looking for a jolly fat man in a red suit with cherry blossoms on his cheeks and blood on his hands if I found a chick stuffed in a chimney.  Also, that scene was shortly after a police officer opened fire on a closet while still in the process of opening it.  I know you think there’s a killer in there, but what about the possibility that there’s a scared girl cowering in there.  Look first, and then shoot.  There’s a novel idea.

I could see no better way to remember Edgar Allan Poe than to review a movie about him on the anniversary of his death (Not the day this comes out, but the day I’m writing it).  Perhaps I could’ve selected a good movie in honor of him, but I chose The Raven instead.  It may really want to be Seven, but it’s more like a two and a half.  Not a fitting remembrance for the man, but it was all I had.  I would not recommend you bother watching this movie, and I would say that chances are you haven’t.  The Raven gets “That’s life, isn’t it?  So much less satisfying than fiction” out of “The last days of his life remain a mystery.”

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Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Enjoy These Final Moments of Peace.

Tuesday again.  Time again for a double feature at my local theater.  It’s problematic for a film critic to hate crowds so much that he doesn’t like to go see new movies until the theaters have slowed down, but that’s the kind of critic you idolize.  Me.  This would normally be too soon for me to want to go see a movie of this magnitude, but there weren’t a lot of options in theaters right now, and my desire to see this movie was pretty strong.  I was never a fan of the TV series this movie comes from, and I didn’t see the greater majority of the movies that helped make the series so popular.  But I did see the movie right before this one and it made me a fan.  I absolutely loved it.  So when they put out a new one, it made me very excited.  Did it live up to those expectations?  Find out as I review Star Trek Into Darkness, based on characters created by Gene Roddenberry, written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof, directed by J. J. Abrams, and starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Benedict Cumberbatch, Peter Weller, Bruce Greenwood, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin, John Cho, Karl Urban, Alice Eve, Noel Clarke, Nazneen Contractor, and Leonard Nimoy.

On a mission to the planet Nibiru, Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) violates the Prime Directive in order to rescue First Officer Spock (Zachary Quinto) from danger.  This causes Admiral Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) to be forced to relieve Kirk of his command of the USS Enterprise.  Elsewhere, a man named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) offers Starfleet Officer Thomas Harewood (Noel Clarke) a way to save his dying child in exchange for blowing up a Starfleet archive.  Admiral Alexander Marcus (Peter Weller) calls together the captains of Starfleet to figure out their next move, falling directly into Harrison’s plan.  Harrison attacks the meeting, killing many of the Starfleet commanders.  In retaliation, Kirk is sent out with 72 prototype Photon Torpedoes with the order to destroy Harrison, while trying not to bring on a full scale war with the Klingons.  But all is not as it appears…

For the first half of this movie, I admit that I was feeling a little underwhelmed by it.  It was good, but it was not living up to my expectations for it.  Then shit started to get real.  Some might be embarrassed to say that they started to tear up near the end, mostly on moments between Spock and Kirk, but I’m not your usual man.  I’m barely a man at all!  What I am is a nerd, so it’s completely appropriate.  The story is also heavy with references to the past of Star Trek, which I’m sure I missed a bunch of because of my relative inexperience with the franchise, but I still got most of them.  I know Khan, for instance.  I know Tribbles.  I also know what happens to Spock at some point in a radioactive room.  But I like that these movies are taking place in an altered timeline so thing happen close to what happened in the past, but occasionally roles are reversed to be able to still catch the audience off guard.  But I was beginning to get trepidations in the beginning because a few things made me think they’d be treading the same ground as the previous movie, like when they took away Kirk’s ship and wanted to put him back in the academy, but they didn’t waste that much time in that.  Then Kirk would start getting at odds with the crew again, although he had a good reason.  I got most worried about how I’d feel about this movie when Kirk and Scotty parted ways.  BRING PEGG BACK!!  But then they did, and I could calm down.  But the end of the movie was filled with some great action and great emotional moments, and I’ve always said that ending strong is more important than opening strong.  I won’t spoil what was happening, but when Uhura told Spock to, “Go get him,” I got some wood, and surprisingly more because of the awesomeness than Zoe Saldana’s hotness.  I would have to admit that I saw the ending coming, making it not that much of a surprise when we find out Kirk’s fate.  I even wrote it in my notes just after I first saw the Tribble.  That being said, I didn’t feel like it was any less effective just because I knew how it would turn out.

There’s really no point even talking about the look of the movie, is there?  You saw the commercials and how awesome and epic they make the movie look, right?  Yeah, that’s what it looks like.  They were not lying to you.

I loved all the performances in this movie as well.  Chris Pine is great as Kirk.  He does the funny parts as well as he does the emotional parts.  He also plays a dick very well, easily making me silently curse him in the theater for making Simon Pegg leave.  I find it hard to talk about Zachary Quinto’s performance as Spock.  Through most of the movie, he’s acting really robotic.  On the other hand, that’s exactly what he’s supposed to be doing.  And he’s able to convey quite a bit of emotion through his performance while still being such a Vulcan, and he kind of breaks down at the end of the movie in an awesome way.  Zoe Saldana is hot.  Simon Pegg is awesome.  Peter Weller was Robocop.  I was unfamiliar with this Benedict Cumberbatch before I went into this movie.  I had heard him talked about a lot in nerdier crowds, so I knew he must have some nerd cred of some sort.  I think it’s because he’s in that Sherlock show, but I’ve never seen it.  And you never see him in The Hobbit because he only lends his voice to it.  That being said, I still thought he was pretty awesome in the movie.  Maybe not quite a Ricardo Montalbán, but pretty damned solid.  Even with the emo hair that occasionally happened in the middle of a fight, he maintained a certain level of quiet badassdom.  And the starring role in this movie for me is the white-haired chick on the command deck of the Enterprise.  I don’t know who she is, but I want to be in her.

Star Trek Into Darkness is another addition to the series that wins in my book.  The movie starts off a little slow for my taste, but ends strongly with a great deal of awesome action and emotion that actually made me tear up.  It looks great and all the performances were also top notch.  I’ve never considered myself a Star Trek fan, but if Abrams keeps this up, I might actually start watching the stuff that inspired the guy to make these awesome movies.  In the meantime, I recommend getting yourself to the theaters to check this one out as soon as you can.  Star Trek Into Darkness gets “If you test me, you will fail” out of “Because I am better.”

WATCH REVIEWS HERE!  YouTube  OTHER JOKES HERE!  Twitter  BE A FAN HERE!  Facebook  If you like these reviews so much, spread the word.  Keep me motivated!  Also, if you like them so much, why don’t you marry them?!

Men in Black III (2012)

I Promised the Secrets of the Universe, Nothing More.

When I went to see Snow White and the Huntsman, I decided that I had the time and the energy to make the day into a double feature.  There were about four movies available at the time that I had any kind of interest in seeing.  Having one taken down at the request of my readers, I decided that I would choose the next one and that I’d just take the one that had gotten the best reviews.  It was fortunate for me that it was also the one that I wanted to see the most.  Being the third part in a series of movies that I have liked so far, as well as being the movie that seemed the most fun, it was an easy decision.  The movie I chose was Men in Black 3, written by Lowell Cunningham, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emma Thompson, Alice Eve, Mike Colter, Bill Hader, Will Arnett, David Rasche, Keone Young, and Nicole Scherzinger.

An intergalactic criminal named Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) is busted out of a prison on the moon by his girlfriend (Nicole Scherzinger).  He sets his intentions on killing an agent of the Men in Black, Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), for shooting his arm off in 1969.  And, because he got that arm shot off in 1969 while trying to stop K from preventing his race of Boglodites from taking over the Earth, he decides he needs to go back in time and kill K.  The strange part is that he succeeds.  K’s partner, Agent J (Will Smith), wakes up to find that the space-time continuum has changed and K has been dead since 1969.  With a little help from the new Chief of the Men in Black, Agent O (Emma Thompson), he figures out what he must do to stop it from happening, so he too goes back to 1969 to stop him.  Of course, a time-travelling black man in 1969 gathers some attention, most notably from Agent K (Josh Brolin).  He must try to convince K that he’s telling the truth so that they can stop Boris and save the Earth.

Much as with the other movies in this series, I’m still charmed by Men in Black 3.  The story follows the same pattern that I remember from the other two movies, but adds interest and emotion to it with the time travel story.  All of the movies have been, at their core, a story of two guys trying to stop the destruction of the world.  The first one added the fish out of water part with J being brought into the Men in Black, the second one added the getting the gang back together thing with having to bring back K, and the third one adds time travel.  That adds for some decent emotion that they barely went for in the first movie and didn’t try for much in the second.  Not only is there the emotion involved in K’s temporary death, but something else that’s pretty sad happens near the end of the movie.  The problem with the thing at the end of the movie is that you can kind of see it coming.  It’s something that my roommate brought to my attention in the Avengers movie, but if they talk about something they’ve never really talked about before, seemingly out of nowhere, you know something’s up.  K defending the person that was being talked about cemented it in my mind, so when it happened, the shock was a little bit lessened.  But you don’t really come to a Men in Black movie for the emotional depth.  It’s more about the cool look and the humor, and both of those are well realized.  Every time J used the neuralizer on someone, the explanations he came up with afterwards were all pretty funny.  There was another point where J started drinking a little kid’s chocolate milk and the little kid said, “Mommy, the president is drinking my milk.”  That’s a solid joke, but it was so quiet I almost missed it.  J makes a joke about agents O and K, and I think you can figure what joke would be made there, but it was still a solid joke.  There were also two references for comedy that were a little obvious.  If you’d seen the other movies, you know that they often have eccentric celebrities on the screen in the background, implying that they’re aliens.  When I started the movie I knew that Lady GaGa would be one of them, and I was right.  Also, when they had Andy Warhol in it, I figured he’d be an easy target for an alien too.  I wasn’t entirely right, but I wasn’t entirely wrong either.

I liked almost all of the performances in this movie.  Will Smith is usually very charming and funny, and he’s also able to bring it with the emotional performance as well.  It’s no surprise that he’s able to do that in this movie, but it’s always a pleasure to watch him do it.  Tommy Lee Jones is also the perfect counterpoint to Will Smith, always able to be the consummate straight man.  He doesn’t bring it too hard with the emotional performances because that wouldn’t be right for the character, but he does have moments where you can see that it’s right under the surface, and it’s really well done.  I think the biggest surprise for me was Josh Brolin.  Not because I didn’t expect quality from him as I’ve seen him do both drama and touches of comedy before, but he does a fantastic impression of Tommy Lee Jones that deserves to be lauded.  I wasn’t really a fan of Michael Stuhlbarg in this movie though.  His character was kind of comic relief and never really worked for me.  Perhaps it was because he reminded me way too much of Justin Bartha’s character in Gigli.  Though their parts were small, I was also happy to see Will Arnett and Bill Hader in this movie, and both were pretty amusing in their small bits.

If you liked the other Men in Black movies, Men in Black 3 should be right up your alley.  It might even overcome those of you that didn’t like the other two.  It’s definitely a candidate for the best of the three, though perhaps the original still edges it out.  MiB3 is funny, interesting, and even has a few moments of emotion to get us more invested.  It still looks great and the greater majority of the performances remain fantastic.  I definitely recommend getting to the theater to watch this.  It’s worth your money.  Men in Black 3 gets “Sort of a surly, older gentleman.  Smiles like this…” out of “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”

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