Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

There’s a Reason I Never Voted for You.

I took myself a little break, but when it came time to come back, I wasn’t entirely sure if my break was self-imposed or not.  I could not find anything in the theaters that interested me!  Whatever was I to do?!  But then I remembered an old friend that I don’t think I’ve spent any time with recently.  An old friend by the name of RedBox.  And there were a couple of movies to be found there that I wanted to see.  Not movies I wanted to see expecting quality, but movies I wanted to see expecting quality reviews to come out of them.  And by that I mean I expect them to suck.  But we’ll just have to wait a paragraph to find out after I tell you a little bit about Olympus Has Fallen, written by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, directed by Antoine Fuqua, and starring Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Rick Yune, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Dylan McDermott, Finley Jacobsen, Melissa Leo, Radha Mitchell, and Ashley Judd.

Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is the head of the Presidential Detail.  While transporting President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart), First Lady Margaret Asher (Ashley Judd), and their son Connor Asher (Finley Jacobsen) to Camp David, a tree branch lands on the windshield, sending the President’s limo off the road.  Banning is only able to save the President and his son.  The most ungrateful POTUS in history then demotes Banning to the Department of the Treasury.  This turns out to be a great idea when a group of North Korean terrorists – led by Kang Yeonsak (Rick Yune) – take control of the White House in order to use something called the Cerberus system to leave the United States defenseless from nuclear attacks.  But little do these Korean terrorists know that we’re still covered by America’s first line of defense: Gerard Butler.

I would give this movie credit for being better than I expected it to be.  My expectations were admittedly low, but it was better than them.  It’s just your fairly standard action movie.  I feel like I’d probably prefer White House Down since it seems almost identical without taking itself too seriously as this movie does.  This movie tries to do the same thing in a more heavy and emotional way that never really worked for me.  It started with the death of the First Lady.  I didn’t really care.  We hadn’t really spent enough time to get emotionally attached to her.  Plus I felt the whole situation was a little stupid, especially when the helicopters arrived right afterwards and I could just imagine everyone saying, “Oh man, that’s right!  We have helicopters!  We could’ve completely avoided this bad driving conditions and come through this situation with at least one more living First Lady!  Boy is my face red.”  And then you demote Banning because he only managed to keep you and your son alive but wasn’t quite able to go above and beyond the call of duty to save your wife too?  That’s some bullshit!  He’s clearly the best guy you have, as evidenced by how easily the Koreans waltzed into the White House.  It seemed like the movie was sending a message to Korea that, if they send enough men and garbage trucks, and if Gerard Butler is busy at the time, then they can take the White House down without too much effort.  Well, if he wasn’t available, then maybe we could settle for Maverick and Goose, ‘cause they never would’ve been taken down by that giant plane with the side-mounted Gatling guns.  They would’ve been flying upside down above that airplane taunting the enemy pilots and completely safe from side-mounted Gatling guns.  And who was aiming those things anyway?  Ah, never mind…

I also didn’t get the whole situation with Kang.  I guess I get his motivation and all, but how the government people not know who he is when they see his face when he’s the most wanted terrorist in the world?  They say that he’s never been photographed, but his picture pops up with his name pretty quickly for that to be true.  Well his plan seemed pretty solid though, at least up until the end.  ::SPOILER ALERT:: I thought his ruse with putting black hoods on everyone was fairly effective for not getting his people killed since they wouldn’t know which one was the President.  It would be effective for everyone but the girl in the crew, I suppose.  The sniper could probably feel pretty safe shooting the one person in the group with tits.  The problem I had with it was that I didn’t see the point of the ruse in the first place, beyond clearing out the rest of the unnecessary people before the climax.  Why bother killing off all your men to make everyone think the President was dead when you’d be activating the Cerberus system 2 minutes later, thus proving that both you and the President were still alive.  ::END SPOILERS::

One thing that I could say with confidence about this movie is that the cast did a great job.  Gerard Butler has made some shitty choices for movies in the past, but he can still bring it with the performances.  He’s a very believable badass, and that was the bulk of what was required of him here.  I did find it amusing that America was almost destroyed because Banning doesn’t use Twitter and doesn’t know what a hash tag is, or perhaps because the other douchebag decided to use “hash tag” instead of the more commonly understood “pound sign.”  I also took issue with the President of this movie, and not just because he demoted the man who saved his life.  …asshole…  I also took issue with the fact that he kept telling his cabinet members to give up their codes to save their lives.  I understand it would make the President look like an asshole if he let them die, but that’s about 5 people who might die as opposed to the millions that will die if they give up those codes.  Let them die bravely to protect the country and do the same yourself.  ‘MERICA!!  Also, Morgan Freeman is the man.  He should not only be the President in every movie, but he should be the President in real life too.

Olympus Has Fallen was roughly what I expected it to be: decent.  It didn’t impress, but it entertained.  And I guess that impressed me because it was more than I expected.  The story was a little over-simple, but the action was pretty good and the performances were better than I would’ve expected.  This movie doesn’t qualify with me as a purchase, but it’s decent enough for a rental.  Olympus Has Fallen gets “Newsflash asshole – I don’t work for you” out of “Why don’t you and I play a game of fuck off.  You go first.”

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Oblivion (2013)

They Lied to You.  It’s Time to Learn the Truth.

When I went to the theaters to catch Star Trek, I had no reservations.  Today’s movie was less so.  I had seen the commercials for this movie and had an inkling of interest in the movie, but never enough that it would be the reason for me to make the trip to the theater.  Attaching it to a movie I wanted to see more made it much more palatable.  And I think it’s odd that I had no interest in this movie because I loved the game I assume it was based on.  In fact, I’ve loved the whole Elder Scrolls series.  I don’t know why they skipped past Daggerfall and Morrowind, but I’m still suspicious of how this game could be turned into a movie.  Do they just ignore all the side quests?  Otherwise, it would be way too long.  Well, we’ll find out as I review Oblivion, based on a graphic novel by Joseph Kosinski, written for the screen by William Monahan, Karl Gajdusek, and Michael Arndt, directed by Joseph Kosinski, and starring Tom Cruise, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko, Morgan Freeman, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Melissa Leo, and Zoë Bell.

It’s the future so Earth is having a bad couple of days.  In 2017 the Earth was destroyed in a battle with some invading aliens when we decided to drop some nukes all over this bitch.  The surviving humans moved to a colony on Saturn’s moon Titan, with a few sticking around to repair survey drones to keep the remaining aliens (called “Scavs”) from destroying the fusion power stations that power the colony.  Two such humans are Tech 49 Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his partner Victoria “Vic” Olsen (Andrea Riseborough), Jack’s navigator who sits on her butt while he does all the work and chats with their weirdo mission Commander Sally (Melissa Leo).  Things are going smoothly and Jack and Vic are preparing to end their stay on Earth when Jack stumbles across a radio tower that summons a pre-invasion American spacecraft back to Earth, containing a sexy astronaut named Julia (Olga Kurylenko) that Jack has been having dreams about (but who hasn’t been?), as well as some secrets that will rock the foundation of Jack’s world.

My low expectations for this movie allowed it to exceed my expectations.  It didn’t blow any minds, but the story was solid, the look was great, and the performances all worked for me.  The biggest problem I had with the movie is that it had nothing to do with the game it took its name from.  No Daedra or anything!  What the movie is similar to is the Matrix, various post-apocalyptic movies, and Independence Day.  We fuck up the planet like a child breaking a toy so no one else can play with it.  Never really makes sense.  Man apparently has the resources to build a space station to escape on, but we’re so stubborn about not giving up our planet that we’ll destroy it first.  Either we win or everyone loses.  On the other hand, I could kind of see us doing that.  The story can kind of be slow going throughout, having not a whole lot going on other than watching Jack fix robots and having little hints at the larger story be revealed slowly.  I started getting bored around the halfway point, especially when it was going pretty heavy on the relationship stuff.  Julia showing up creates a love triangle between her, Jack, and Victoria that they really drained for all it was worth, and it wasn’t worth a whole lot to me.  The only thing it got out of me was a laugh at how much ‘splaining Jack was going to have to do to the two ladies.  ::SPOILER ALERT::  Then the movie turns into Independence Day because the big plan is to fly yourself into the mothership and blow up.  Not the greatest plan to be sure, but I’m sure Jack took solace in the fact that he had plenty of spares if his plan didn’t work out.  But I don’t know how that even got close to working in the first place.  Sally is a super smart computer intelligence, but she can’t figure out that something is amiss when Tech 49 rides up in Tech 52’s ship, even though they shouldn’t know each other exist?  The numbers are written on his shirt and the ship.  Infants and monkeys can tell if two things don’t match.  ::END SPOILERS::

The movie does very well with its look.  Everything is visually well-realized.  It looks dystopian while still being pretty beautiful and spectacular.  It shows a lot of imagination in the designs of everything, from the fusion plants to the ship that Jack flies to the tower he lives in.  A dystopian movie is always able to solicit a bit of a reaction by showing familiar landmarks like the Empire State Building buried up to the top floor in sand.  The action is fairly rare in the movie, but most of it is good.  I liked the fight between Jack and the Scavs in the library because the look of it reminded me of Gears of War, with 80% less raspiness.

I was not surprised by the quality of the performances in the movie so much as I was surprised by the quality of the actors they got.  I only knew one of them going into the movie, but I knew he was good.  The ones I didn’t know were in the movie were also as good as they usually are, but I didn’t know they were in it.  Tom Cruise is the only person I knew would be here, and he typically brings some quality.  I didn’t know who Andrea Riseborough was, but she was also pretty good.  I had no idea that Olga Kurylenko, Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo, and the Kingslayer himself, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, were in this movie, but they tend to be good as well.  Kurylenko helped make it easy for me to relate to Tom Cruise in this movie because I dream of Kurylenko too.  Who wouldn’t?  Morgan Freeman’s appearance was a bit bothersome to me at first, but only because he came off as a bad guy in the movie.  I don’t like Morgan Freeman as a bad guy.  He’s a great actor with a lot of range, but he’s just so likeable.  That was one of the main problems I had with the movie Wanted.  That and it being entirely mediocre.  Melissa Leo also did a good job.  Her role didn’t seem to require much out of her as she was just vaguely robotic, but also somehow bitchy.  And she got much more bitchy by the end.  They should’ve called her HAL-E from the way she looked at the end.  That’s not a WALL-E reference, but a HAL reference, just so we’re clear.  The only performances I really took issue with were those damned surveyor drones.  Those things were ungrateful pricks.

Oblivion was a fine enough movie, but perhaps not fine enough to inspire me to recommend that you see it in theaters.  The story was okay, but nothing spectacular and a little slow moving.  But the visual style and the performances were all impressive.  I could get behind recommending this movie as a rental eventually, but for the time being you can do without.  Oblivion gets “We won the war, but they destroyed half the planet” out of “Classic game.”

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?!

The Fighter (2010)

White People Do This to Other White People

The award nominations that today’s movie received piqued my interest in it.  But, generally speaking, I get turned off by these types of movies.  Drama movies tend to be quite the journey to make it through, having their ups and downs and usually the downs are a lot heavier than the ups.  But I’m also a fan of boxing movies.  I would never call myself a boxing fan, but boxing movies tend to be more interesting.  They’re usually fairly uplifting stories about facing adversity and rising above it.  And there’s some face punching to keep me interested.  I put today’s movie on my Netflix queue when I started doing reviews and even noticed that it was streaming instantly, but I never felt like I was in the mood to watch it.  It took so long that it actually got sent to me even though I could’ve watched it without having to wait on shipping, but it sat on my desk unwatched for a while longer.  I finally reached a point where I couldn’t think of anything else to watch, so I decided it was time to watch this movie.  Let’s see how that went in my review of The Fighter, based on the life of Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund, written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson, directed by David O. Russell, and starring Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, Jack McGee, Mickey O’Keefe, Frank Renzulli, and Sugar Ray Leonard.

Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) is a boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts, managed by his mother Alice Ward (Melissa Leo) and trained by his half-brother Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale).  Micky is not doing well as a boxer, considered mainly a stepping stone for better boxers, but he’s looking to change that.  Dicky is being filmed by a documentary crew about his comeback.  Micky gets left in a bad situation – fighting a boxer he shouldn’t be fighting – by his mother and brother, which leaves him wondering if he’s in the best situation for him.  His brother’s addiction to crack is not really helping matters.  He meets and starts a relationship with a bartender named Charlene Fleming (Amy Adams), but she’s not really accepted by his family.  Dicky’s trouble eventually leads to his incarceration, and Micky gets his hand broken in the process.  While in jail, Dicky and his family are embarrassed to find that the documentary was actually called High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell, and actually about Dicky’s crack addiction.  With Charlene at his side, Micky cuts his mother loose, gets a new manager, starts training with Micky O’Keefe (Himself), and starts actually winning fights.

At first, I found myself a little let down by this movie.  Not because it wasn’t good or anything, but because I somehow went in expecting a different movie.  I don’t know how I got those expectations, knowing that this movie actually got award consideration, but I was kind of expecting a movie about boxing.  Boxing is actually fairly secondary in this movie to the family drama.  Once I had gotten that through my mind and I realized what I was watching, it made the movie much better.  I don’t think I’d say the story was what deserved to be applauded as it was just the life of Micky and Dicky.  They were interesting lives and made for an interesting watch, but I don’t feel comfortable giving the writers too much credit.  The action of the movie was decent too, when it happened.  The fights were few and far between and I would’ve appreciated more of them, but that wasn’t really what this movie was going for.  I probably would’ve appreciated more action-packed, Rocky-esque fights, but that also wasn’t really what they were going for.  They wanted realistic boxing, but since I’ve never been that big of a fan of actual boxing, that never really excited me.  Of course, my favorite part of boxing is always just watching the knockout compilations on YouTube.  Real boxing is often too slow for me, but if you’re a boxing fan you’ll probably really enjoy the realism of the fight.

I think the greater majority of the praise this movie received came from the performances.  And these performances certainly did not disappoint.  The greater majority of the cast not only put on a great performance, but they became the character.  I don’t know that I’d call the greater majority of them likeable, but they seemed like the real people they were trying to be (at least as best as I can tell from the limited time I’ve spent with them on the making of featurette).  I wasn’t entirely impressed with Mark Wahlberg in this one … or any one I can think of.  He was probably a lot like Micky Ward, but I don’t know Micky Ward.  I’ve seen Mark Wahlberg before, and he acted a lot like him.  He wasn’t bad, but everyone else being really good makes him fall short.  Christian Bale was almost unrecognizable.  He lost a lot of weight, wore fake teeth, and acted exactly like a crackhead.  I didn’t want to have to spend any time around that guy.  Same goes for Melissa Leo as their mother.  She was a controlling annoying bitch, who would rather defend her crackhead son than give Micky the credit he deserves.  Amy Adams was also really good in this movie, and was hot and wore a bra you could see her nipples through.  YAY!  And she’s the one that punches one of Micky’s asshole family members in the face, which was very satisfying to me.  Micky’s baby mamma was also a dirty bitch.  Basically, none of these characters were likeable, but the actors deserve props for acting like them.

The Fighter was a good movie, but not entirely what I expected when I went in.  The story was good, the boxing was very realistic, and the performances were mostly superb.  Being not a fan of dramas or boxing, it’s not really the movie for me, but there are definitely lots of people that would love this movie, and nobody can take anything away from the performances.  I recommend this movie for a watch.  Especially since it’s available to stream on Netflix.  The Fighter gets “I told everybody I was gonna win that fight and get back on track” out of “I heard she’s into threeways!”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Red State (2011)

Today I consider myself a professional movie reviewer because I received an early viewing of Kevin Smith’s newest and second to last movie, Red State.  …Okay, to be honest, I viewed it on iTunes in an early showing type thing for $10.  But still!  Red State stars Michael Parks, Melissa Leo, John Goodman, Kyle Gallner, Kerry Bishe, Michael Angarano, Stephen Root, and Kevin Smith’s wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith … and it rocks!

Red State starts off as the tale of 3 high schoolers lookin’ for some sexy time.  One of the kids, Jared (Kyle Gallner), finds a site on the interwebs where people can meet up to get laid.  The woman he meets on this site says she will take on him and his two friends, Travis (Michael Angarano) and Billy Ray (Nicholas Braun), so the 3 head out for some action.  On the way there, Travis accidentally sideswipes a car parked on the road and, when they go to investigate, a man pops up and startles them off.  Shortly thereafter, so does the man in his lap (GAY ROADSIDE NOOKIE!).  The 3 continue on and arrive at a trailer in the middle of nowhere where they are greeted by the woman, Sarah (Melissa Leo).  She accommodates them in her trailer with beers and the boys soon find out they’ve been drugged.  Meanwhile, at the police station, the man who was sideswiped earlier turns out to be the local law, Sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root), a closeted homosexual who can apparently oft times be found on the side of the road with men, unbeknownst to his wife.  He sends his deputy off to find the car that sideswiped him.

Jared wakes up in a cage, hearing a sermon.  He finds himself in the chapel of the Five Points Church, a group of religious nuts modeled after the Westboro Baptist Church.  The sermon is being delivered by their version of Fred Phelps, Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks).  After his fire and brimstone “God hates fags”-type speech, he unveils a gay man saran wrapped to a cross and they proceed to shoot him in the head, dropping his corpse into a basement where Travis and Billy Ray are being held.  They then saran wrap Jared to the same cross.  Outside, the deputy arrives at the Five Points Church and sees the car that sideswiped the Sheriff.  The Pastor goes out to meet him and send him away.  Meanwhile, Billy Ray and Travis start to free themselves using the dead gay corpse’s exposed bone to cut their bindings.  Billy Ray leaves Travis to rot, but is soon shot by Ralph Garmin, who is then shot himself.  The deputy hears the shots and calls it in, and is then shot himself.  The Pastor threatens the Sheriff with photos of his roadside gayness in order to keep him silent.  The Sheriff makes a call and it gets to ATF Special Agent Keenan (John Goodman).  The rest of the movie is how self righteous, religious gun nuts react to someone trying to serve a search warrant to them.  Hint: it doesn’t go well.

I’ve got to say, I’m a huge Kevin Smith fan.  I own every movie he’s directed (yes, even CopOut) and I love the greater majority of them.  And lately, even more than his movies, I love him for his podcast/internet radio endeavors with Smodcast Internet Radio.  And, being an avid listener of Smodcast, I have been beaten over the head with this movie for a very long time now.  So when listening to his podcast and I realized I was still in time to catch this movie on iTunes, I could not pass up the opportunity.  So, let me say right now, Smith has not let me down.  This movie is great.  This is Smith’s first attempt to venture out of comedy (though his comedies have varied in comedic genre quite a bit) and into horror.  Well, he called it horror if memory serves.  I don’t know that I would call it horror.  It’s somewhere between horror and action to me.  I’d call it suspense.  This movie was absolutely riveting from start to finish.  As I usually do, I was attempting to play a video game while watching this movie on my computer, but I had to stop because my controller kept turning itself off from inactivity.  I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing!

This movie not only plays different from other Smith movies, it looks completely different.  A lot of his movies (Clerks excluded, of course) are pretty colorful movies.  This movie is dark and gritty, with a lot of the color really toned down, somewhat like what they did in Saving Private Ryan.  Also, as Smith himself tends to say, most of his movies don’t involve any movement for the camera.  And in a dialogue heavy movie as his usually are, that works fine.  This movie is filmed as if by a frantic bystander with a handheld camera and really draws the audience in to feeling like they are there amongst the religious craziness.

The acting continues the awesomeness of this movie.  A lot of the movie hangs around Kyle Gallner, and he is great.  I spent the entire movie trying to figure out where I’ve seen him, and it apparently was in the new Nightmare on Elm Street, Jennifer’s Body and the Haunting in Connecticut.  Good to see he’s finally allowed in a good movie.  Another big part of the movie is following Dan Connor … I mean John Goodman, who is also fantastic.  He had to be really conflicted about the orders he received in this movie and really did a great job, though I can’t say I expect much less from Goodman.  He seemed to have slimmed down a good amount for this movie too.  The driving factor of the whole movie has to be Michael Parks; a man most movie goers would recognize but not by name.  He was twice in Kill Bill and was pretty memorable in From Dusk Till Dawn too.  Oh man is he good in this.  He is freaky and charismatic at the same time, the kind of guy that would attract these kind of crazies.  And backing him up was recent award winner Melissa Leo who loses her shit after the death of her husband in this movie and may have freaked me out more than Parks.

If there was a complaint to be made of this movie, I’d say I wasn’t the biggest fan of the ending.  I don’t want to ruin it because I think you should all see this in whatever method you can, but suffice to say the ending is a little deus ex machina and unsatisfying to me, but nowhere near enough to ruin the movie.  Saying more would ruin it, so I shan’t.  Go see this movie!  I was happy to give my money to this movie in order to support a man that has given me so much enjoyment in his other movies while he takes his movie away from the studio system and brings it straight to the fans where it belongs.  And if Kevin Smith hasn’t brought you enjoyment through his movies or podcast, then I’m not sure how we are even friends.

My personal kudos to Kevin Smith for a job well done.  I will happily be purchasing this movie when it is released on DVD.  In the meantime, if this review goes up while it’s still available on iTunes, I fully recommend you go rent it there or almost anywhere else video on demand can be found (I think it’s on X-box live, Playstation Network, etc.).  It was only 10 bucks for me, and let’s face it, that’s how much a movie costs anyway, and iTunes will save you the drive.  And Kevin Smith shot his wife in the face for this movie!  …Okay he only wrote it in the script, but I saw it happen in the movie!  I give this a “I highly doubt God hates fags, but Robert loves Red State” out of Eleventeen.

And, as always, please rate, comment, and/or like this post and others.  It may help me get better.