Observe and Report - Review

Observe and Report will definitely divide audiences. I love the fact that the advertising makes it look like a zany comedy, but ultimately it may hurt the film because it sidesteps the audiences expectations. The film is pitch dark comedy more along the lines of Scorsese's King of Comedy than the previous mall security guard effort which i did not see. The film involves a very delusional and slightly psychotic man played by Seth Rogen, who has been allowed to somehow be in a position of minor power to surround himself with like-minded individuals.

The film kicks off with letting us know right away the "danger" of the flick, the flasher running around assaulting women in the parking lot. When the flasher encounters Brandi (Anna Faris) and scars her eyes with his junk, Ronnie Barnhardt, head of mall security and part time psycho, makes it his personal mission to catch the bastard. In the way is Ray Liotta's Detective Harrison who is actually trying to conduct a professional investigation. Barnhardt sees the way Brandi responds to Harrison and decides to become a cop. Well, hilarity ensues at this point, right. Yeah, if you are in the correct head space to watch the flick. This whole movie is funny like the scene in Pulp Fiction when Marvin gets shot in the face. That's the kind of funny they went for a succeeded very well in my opinion.

Rogen did quite well in the flick playing a variation on his every guy schlub character, however with an edge, a highly unstable edge. Anna Faris once again shows why she belongs in comedies due to her fearlessness and complete lack of vanity in the thankless role. Michael Pena was also a very important part to making this flick as funny as it is. Jody Hill's second feature after the offbeat and funny Foot Fist Way shows that he could have a long career in this kind of comedy. This is another flick I cant quite recommend to everyone but also think by now you will know whether or not you want to see it, so go ahead and do so.

Knowing - Personal Addendum

So as you've hopefully read i went to see Knowing Friday night. I'll have to watch the film again due to the seething rage that coursed through me for about half the film due to some jackasses sitting behind me in the theater. This was apparently social time and not shut the fuck up and pay attention to the 20 yard screen in the front of the auditorium time for them. As if it weren't bad enough that the verbal mating ritual were occurring 4 feet to my right throughout the film, at one point when the female half went to the bathroom and cool guy got up and walked to the front of the theater to talk to another friend in the audience.

On top of this there was older movie lady who sucked all her soda out of her cup and thought that by constantly shaking the cup more liquid would appear. Every five minutes or so*ka-chunk ka-chunk* of her giving the cup a vigorous shake and then sucking on the straw. Now i was in Picayune, MS at the cheapest theatre I've found in years so all of this should have been no surprise to me. I had a vision at one point of throwing my full twenty ounce bottle of Coke at the folks on the left and then taking ice lady's cup and throwing it in the trash (she was older so physical violence toward her would have made me feel terrible).

The sad thing is, it has now become an expected occurrence at the theater for me. Unless it's a Friday night at the Slidell Grand movie theater where they have their watchdog Woodruff. I'll take this time to shout out to Woodruff because he has made my movie going experiences more pleasant. His no-nonsense and honest approach in telling people to shut the hell up and don't text during the movie is refreshing, and the fact that he enforces it is doubly so. He does it with a style and honesty that is also light, giving us his honest opinions on the new films we are all going to see. So awesome job Woodruff and Slidell Grand theatre, I wish more theaters would take your approach to ensuring that i didn't just spend 10 bucks on a movie to learn all the latest high school gossip.

Knowing - Review

Saw KNOWING tonight, I know its been out a few weeks but with my asinine position right now I get to see maybe one movie every two weeks compared to the 2 a week when my situation improves. So I consider this a lucky week, 12 Rounds last week and another this week! I’m moving up in the world! Observe and Report is next week and plans are in motion for that to be the next on the theater list. OK, KNOWING, short version, worth seeing particularly if you are a fan of Alex Proyas, the director. This movie is not on the intellectual level with say, Dark City, but is most certainly not the thing Fox turned I, Robot into. But regardless worth seeing.

KNOWING revolves around Caleb and John Koestler, 50 years ago the students of Caleb’s school buried a time capsule and they are about to rip it up out of the ground. Caleb receives one of the envelopes from within the capsule to open and it is a page of numbers. Caleb takes it home with him where his father John finds it and out of curiosity starts “decoding” the numbers. Turn out the numbers reflect a date and number of people dead. After matching all but the last 3 sets off numbers John tries to convince others of what the paper could be. After another of the predictions come true John is determined to save as many lives as he can. All the while mysterious strangers are seemingly stalking Caleb and Abby, the grand-daughter of the little girl who wrote the numbers originally. The question is can John stop the “end of the world” as the numbers suggest or will he be able to keep him self and his family safe?

Well what I got from this film it a bit of a heavy handed sci-fi take on The Rapture described in the bible. That’s one thing I kind of enjoyed is the questions raised about determinism versus free will. Is it fate that all the stars are aligning and this MIT professor with hardcore religious issues due to the death of his wife or a coincidence? I say the film is heavy handed because rather than giving us those issues to continue pondering after we walk out of the theater, we are given the writers idea of the answer. This is also fine because other wise the film would have not had an ending for majority of theater goers to latch onto.

This isn’t really an action film per-se but there are action scenes. These portions of the film work amazingly well despite a very few minor wonky effects shots. The acting is about on par for the film save for a few overacted moments in it. I’d like to point out the kids in particular because so many times I’ve found kids in movies like this really annoying. These kids didn’t get into the annoying range save for a few scenes in the beginning trying to make them out to be precocious, because apparently no movie with kids in it since Dakota Fanning came on the scene, can not be precocious. There are no Jake Lloyd in Phantom Menace bad moments I can assure you however.

So yeah, the bottom line is this is an above average sci-fi flick that takes a little bit of open-mindedness to enjoy. Go see it if it sounds interesting to you but I most certainly cant recommend it to everyone.

Till next time guys.

How To Lose Friends and Alienate People - on DVD

OK this is one I missed in theatres and was really looking forward to Simon Pegg having a bigger movie where he’s the lead role than the DTV stuff and minor roles he’s gotten since the success of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The previews made it look like The Devil Wears Prada for guys, which it essentially was. The short version, see it if you’re a fan of someone in it, if not you aren’t missing much. Story goes an idealistic young independent newspaper editor is called out of the blue by the editor in chief of a large New York magazine and offered a job. He accepts immediately and goes to New York with visions of fame and starlets in his head. Of course if everything worked out properly there wouldn’t be a movie, right? So lets just all assume that we all figure hilarity ensues, capiche?

So the flick would probably have been dead in the water save for the cast. Simon Pegg gets by with pure charisma and Megan Fox get by on pure hotness, although she isn’t given much to do in the film. Jeff Bridges also works out well as the formerly idealistic editor who has made it to the top. He explains at one point that he used to be like Pegg’s Sidney Young, idealistic and raging against the machine because he wasn’t “invited to the party”. Now that he was at the party he needs to chill out with the idealism and attacking the egotistical celebrities and play along. So there was good message in the flick at some point but it was apparently lost in the translation or rewrites or whatever happened to turn this from something that someone thought enough of to throw a bunch of money at it to put it in theatres to be seen by millions… and it wasn’t because it was a mix of slapstick, smart humor, and romcom, it kinda didn’t know what it wanted to be or where it wanted to go. So a tacked on Hollywood-ed ending later this is the version we got in theatres and again its an “eh“ type of film. Oh yeah Kirsten Dunst was in it, as the secondary, first love interest. She was adequate as well. So yeah I guess that’s the best thing I can say it was a movie, entertaining at times, existing at others.

Till next time guys.