Bad Teacher I believe I once wrote that Cameron Diaz has passed her sell by date. And that was months ago. Here were are in the summer of 2011 and the date is long passed and all we're left with is mold. Is this woman on drugs? Her face looks it. The premise of this movie is a teacher cheats and steals her way to make money to get fake breasts. The drug/sex humor that some think is "adult humor" creates uncomfortable laughs in the theater because I believe people feel obligated or under some sort of social contract to laugh at such dross. It isn't clever; the story is dumb; the actors crap. 1/10

Beautiful Boy Might be the most predictable, depressing movie I've ever seen. It's so sad, looking back on it makes me sad even today. The father in the movie does an amazing job. 5/10

Biutiful Spaniards are weird people. Every person from Spain I've ever known was a bit odd and it seems their movie makers are even weirder. Biutiful is a 150 minute movie in English subtitles about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions. The movie focuses on a man who sees himself as a Messiah, a very humble one, who sees the lost and feels like he must save them. Yet every time he tries to help someone, it seems that only misery comes from it. And like all messiahs, he carries the burdens of a corrupt world and will be crucified for his good will. The characters are complex and real; they move the movie progressively forward, but the movie is aimless and the director gets lost in his way trying to be profound. Reading the reviews by professional critics shows how poor film criticism has become. They don't understand this movie at all. 4/10

Burlesque One of the all-time terrible stories. The writing of this movie is horrific. Christina is attractive and has a few good parts, but overall, she is not a good actress. Cher should be in a nursing home. It is pathetic how much surgery she has had. Movie was too long. 3/10

Captain America Like another poster recently said, the trope of Nazis as the embodiment of all evil is growing old. Half the arguments on the internet end up at Nazism. A quarter of the blockbusters today use Nazism as the antagonist or symbol of evil. It on affirms what religion has always known: when telling a story for the masses, you need to have a bad guy and a form of evil, thus Satan. But surely Hollywood can find a new, more relevant villain.

The actor who plays Captain America is terrible. The woman he loves is beautiful and probably the most compelling of the characters. The dialogue certainly is telling of the movie's comic book origin. I groaned several times at Tommy Jones' script. The story is absurd. Either make the movie sci-fi or make it historical. Don't mix the two, at least not like C.A. does. As a summer popcorn flick, it still fails. There's no drama. We know, because of the opening scene, that the bombs headed to America fail. At least give us some tension. Trying to shift the time frames in this movie was a terrible fail. Despite a couple of quotes that are pro-justice instead of pro-war, this movie is very pro-war, and as a result, I would highly recommend you don't see it.2/10

The Change-Up Audre Lorde once famously penned, "There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt." Before you say to yourself, "Oh here's another of TulaneLSU's rambling reviews. I bet this will be a comparison and contrasting of The Change-Up to movies like Vice Versa, Like Father Like Son, 18 Again, Freaky Friday and Big." As usual, you're wrong.

Whether the writers intended to or not, and I doubt they did, they simply made a movie, a bad one at that, about Matthew 7:5: "First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." Once you get around all the unnecessary nudity, infinite F-bombs, and drug use, what you find as the center of this movie are two characters who can see all the faults of their friends' lives but none of the faults of their own lives. The movie isn't about "grass is greener" mentality or learning not to take certain things for granted, as some uneducated critics have stated. Yes, the grass is greener switch is necessary in the movie, but it is only used as a device to point to the movie's core: the inability to see what is wrong in your own life. Only when we step outside of ourselves are we then able to see our faults as they are.

Thus the movie makes a claim about human nature: to be human is to be deluded. And isn't that true. Think about hoow easily we deceive ourselves into thinking we're something we're not. More often than not we build ourselves into perfect beings, smarter, more athletic, better looking, and better leaders than we actually are. But the beauty in humanity is that we also have the capability to step outside of ourselves, to look in the mirror, so to speak. Do we need to literally have an outer body experience to see the log in our own eye? No, but it sure helps. If only the director had left out all the obscenity and used Olivia Wilde as an actress rather than a Megan Fox Transformers sub. There was great potential missed in this film. 3/10

Chronicles of Narnia A fun movie that can stand alone. I have never seen the other Narnia movies, but thought this one did a fine job of combining adventure with interesting CGI and a positive morality. The kids are a bit annoying, but the movie builds to a triumphant crescendo. 7/10

The Company Men If you want to see Ben Affleck's pro-unionist, pro-socialist views, this is your movie. Set in the backdrop of the 2008 financial crash, the movie is a manifesto against corporate greed and a warning to people who invest their lives in their work. As a Christian, I am against both, but I do not understand why Affleck thinks he's for the average man. He's a celebrity who spends his time and money with celebrities. He knows as much about an honest day's work as I know about my Beloved's ancillary regions.

The movie hums at the pace of a mass transit bus. This movie is more a movie about what could have been. It could have been a great movie if the director bothered to make the characters lovable. It could have been a great story had the writer not allowed Affleck's unionist propaganda to infiltrate at every possible turn. At one point we hear that the CEO makes 700 times what the avg. employee makes in the company. Funny considering Affleck makes $37,000,000 a year and the median American salary is $32,000. For those not good at math, Affleck makes about 1,200 times the average American salary. Chris Cooper gives the strongest performance, and his role is most credible while the others are rather empty.

The writing is at its worse and most confused at the very end. After 90 minutes of pounding in the message that hard work with your hands that produces something palpable is good, we end in "triumph." Not the triumph of hard work, but of returning to the office to do exactly what it was they were all doing before. Wholly unsatisfying and it shows the shoddy craftsmanship of a splintered mind and life - one that does not practice what he preaches - and ruins the possibility of this being a good movie. 5/10

This post was edited on 11/16/11 at 7:24 am

3 ...

Report Post

Posted by TulaneLSU

Member since Aug 2003

Member since Dec 2007

13298 posts

Posted on 11/16/11 at 7:20 am to TulaneLSU

Conan the Barbarian Edgar in Shakespeare's King Lear boldly states, "The worst is not / So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'" Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that Conan was to be a big movie, one of those classics of adventure that come along only once every couple of years. The facts that it opened the week after school began and had not one decent actor should have tipped me off.

If there is anything redeeming about this movie, it's that the lead actress is not butt ugly. Besides that, this movie is nothing more than gore, violence, cheap CGI, and a terrible, terrible script. I don't even know if I should attend to this movie any longer, even if it is to give it a thorough berating. Let's first discuss the scenes. Holy marshmallows and attention deficit disorder. The writer must have intended for this movie to go on for five hours. Mercifully for us, it was chopped down to less than two, but all the scenes in part survive. As a result, we are on a non-stop journey through borrowed scene after borrowed scene. We go from Season of the Witch to Pirates of the Carbs to the Lord of the Rings to Indian Jones within three minutes! Chop, chop, Suey! We travel from kingdom to kingdom like we're changing scenes in Seinfeld. Like being thrown into a genealogy in Genesis, we're flooded with an undue mass of names, legends, and places. And the dialogue, my God, my ears were bleeding. "She must be pretty" - that's all that can be said of the lead lady, whose beauty is supposed to be great. I kid you not.

None of the characters matter. They are all caricatures: Conan: a child man set on revenge. The bad guy with the crown: a man driven by ambition. The witch: a woman who jealously wants to be her mother. Her outfits look like the design department raided the costume aisle at Walmart the day after Halloween. There was the possibility to make her character interesting, but the director, I think, was not intelligent enough to see it. Instead, we get characters that mean nothing. Even in the movie's one sex scene, there is not an iota of emotion. It's wham, bam, thank you sir. And yet the audience is expected to believe that these characters are so bound to each other that they will risk all to save the other! After an interesting opening scene where the character of a boy is building, I could not say a single scene in the rest of the movie mattered in character development. All was vain and empty.

Whoever made this movie, and let's pray he's not allowed to make another movie, must have a fetish for blood because in the end, all this movie is about is revenge and blood. And even the blood scenes are terribly dark and quickened so the viewer cannot see how poorly the scenes are acted and made. A formulaic film that tries to be monumental, it fails on every level. It's easily the worst remake since Russel Crowe's Robin Hood, and likely, a lot worse. Is it the worst action adventure movie ever made? If I said it is, would that mean it isn't? 1/10

This post was edited on 11/16/11 at 7:24 am

2 ...

Report Post

Posted by iwyLSUiwy

I'm your huckleberry

Member since Apr 2008

34795 posts

Posted on 12/13/11 at 12:51 pm to TulaneLSU

quote:
Bad Teacher I believe I once wrote that Cameron Diaz has passed her sell by date. And that was months ago. Here were are in the summer of 2011 and the date is long passed and all we're left with is mold. Is this woman on drugs? Her face looks it. The premise of this movie is a teacher cheats and steals her way to make money to get fake breasts. The drug/sex humor that some think is "adult humor" creates uncomfortable laughs in the theater because I believe people feel obligated or under some sort of social contract to laugh at such dross. It isn't clever; the story is dumb; the actors crap. 1/10

Beautiful Boy Might be the most predictable, depressing movie I've ever seen. It's so sad, looking back on it makes me sad even today. The father in the movie does an amazing job. 5/10

Biutiful Spaniards are weird people. Every person from Spain I've ever known was a bit odd and it seems their movie makers are even weirder. Biutiful is a 150 minute movie in English subtitles about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions. The movie focuses on a man who sees himself as a Messiah, a very humble one, who sees the lost and feels like he must save them. Yet every time he tries to help someone, it seems that only misery comes from it. And like all messiahs, he carries the burdens of a corrupt world and will be crucified for his good will. The characters are complex and real; they move the movie progressively forward, but the movie is aimless and the director gets lost in his way trying to be profound. Reading the reviews by professional critics shows how poor film criticism has become. They don't understand this movie at all. 4/10

Burlesque One of the all-time terrible stories. The writing of this movie is horrific. Christina is attractive and has a few good parts, but overall, she is not a good actress. Cher should be in a nursing home. It is pathetic how much surgery she has had. Movie was too long. 3/10

Captain America Like another poster recently said, the trope of Nazis as the embodiment of all evil is growing old. Half the arguments on the internet end up at Nazism. A quarter of the blockbusters today use Nazism as the antagonist or symbol of evil. It on affirms what religion has always known: when telling a story for the masses, you need to have a bad guy and a form of evil, thus Satan. But surely Hollywood can find a new, more relevant villain.

The actor who plays Captain America is terrible. The woman he loves is beautiful and probably the most compelling of the characters. The dialogue certainly is telling of the movie's comic book origin. I groaned several times at Tommy Jones' script. The story is absurd. Either make the movie sci-fi or make it historical. Don't mix the two, at least not like C.A. does. As a summer popcorn flick, it still fails. There's no drama. We know, because of the opening scene, that the bombs headed to America fail. At least give us some tension. Trying to shift the time frames in this movie was a terrible fail. Despite a couple of quotes that are pro-justice instead of pro-war, this movie is very pro-war, and as a result, I would highly recommend you don't see it.2/10

The Change-Up Audre Lorde once famously penned, "There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt." Before you say to yourself, "Oh here's another of TulaneLSU's rambling reviews. I bet this will be a comparison and contrasting of The Change-Up to movies like Vice Versa, Like Father Like Son, 18 Again, Freaky Friday and Big." As usual, you're wrong.

Whether the writers intended to or not, and I doubt they did, they simply made a movie, a bad one at that, about Matthew 7:5: "First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." Once you get around all the unnecessary nudity, infinite F-bombs, and drug use, what you find as the center of this movie are two characters who can see all the faults of their friends' lives but none of the faults of their own lives. The movie isn't about "grass is greener" mentality or learning not to take certain things for granted, as some uneducated critics have stated. Yes, the grass is greener switch is necessary in the movie, but it is only used as a device to point to the movie's core: the inability to see what is wrong in your own life. Only when we step outside of ourselves are we then able to see our faults as they are.

Thus the movie makes a claim about human nature: to be human is to be deluded. And isn't that true. Think about hoow easily we deceive ourselves into thinking we're something we're not. More often than not we build ourselves into perfect beings, smarter, more athletic, better looking, and better leaders than we actually are. But the beauty in humanity is that we also have the capability to step outside of ourselves, to look in the mirror, so to speak. Do we need to literally have an outer body experience to see the log in our own eye? No, but it sure helps. If only the director had left out all the obscenity and used Olivia Wilde as an actress rather than a Megan Fox Transformers sub. There was great potential missed in this film. 3/10

Chronicles of Narnia A fun movie that can stand alone. I have never seen the other Narnia movies, but thought this one did a fine job of combining adventure with interesting CGI and a positive morality. The kids are a bit annoying, but the movie builds to a triumphant crescendo. 7/10

The Company Men If you want to see Ben Affleck's pro-unionist, pro-socialist views, this is your movie. Set in the backdrop of the 2008 financial crash, the movie is a manifesto against corporate greed and a warning to people who invest their lives in their work. As a Christian, I am against both, but I do not understand why Affleck thinks he's for the average man. He's a celebrity who spends his time and money with celebrities. He knows as much about an honest day's work as I know about my Beloved's ancillary regions.

The movie hums at the pace of a mass transit bus. This movie is more a movie about what could have been. It could have been a great movie if the director bothered to make the characters lovable. It could have been a great story had the writer not allowed Affleck's unionist propaganda to infiltrate at every possible turn. At one point we hear that the CEO makes 700 times what the avg. employee makes in the company. Funny considering Affleck makes $37,000,000 a year and the median American salary is $32,000. For those not good at math, Affleck makes about 1,200 times the average American salary. Chris Cooper gives the strongest performance, and his role is most credible while the others are rather empty.

The writing is at its worse and most confused at the very end. After 90 minutes of pounding in the message that hard work with your hands that produces something palpable is good, we end in "triumph." Not the triumph of hard work, but of returning to the office to do exactly what it was they were all doing before. Wholly unsatisfying and it shows the shoddy craftsmanship of a splintered mind and life - one that does not practice what he preaches - and ruins the possibility of this being a good movie. 5/10