eric135

Superman Man of Steel

I didn't think I'd enjoy yet another Superman movie. I didn't enjoy Superman Returns back in 2006. But I enjoyed Man of Steel. 

• I'm thankful the story didn't go through Clark Kent's childhood. The movie did start on Krypton as they launched Superman into space, but the way it happened was interesting. Superman's childhood was handle through flashbacks, which I liked.
• I liked the fact that Lois Lane knew who Superman was from the very beginning. No goofy-glasses-as-desguise plot lines. 
• There were odd Christian themes. There was a Son, a Father and a Holy Ghost (of sorts), and both fathers make the ultimate sacrifice to send their only son to save the Earth. There also was a scene where Jor-El sends Superman into battle -- "You can save them... you can save all of them..." and then Superman's body makes a suspended cross in space before the battle begins. 
• Probably the biggest surprise, for me, came at the end. Superman killed somebody. Yes, it was his arch nemesis, and Zod totally deserved it, but still. Superman has never killed before. 
• We were expecting an Easter Egg at the end, maybe setting up the Justice League movies to come, but there were none.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness

Of course, I loved it. Spoiler Alert if you haven't seen the movie and still want the surprise.

• There is a lot of fast-paced action, of course. 
• The original Wrath of Khan is still my favorite Star Trek movie, but Benedict Cumberpatch makes an awesome Khan. I figured it was Khan when Kirk said there were seventy two torpedoes. I remember from the original episode Khan had seventy two shipmates in cryo-stasis. But it was still a good reveal. We could tell who in the theater were Trekkies: When they made the reveal, we were the ones spitting up our food, croaking "I KNEW it!" 
• While Uhura does make a good hero figure, I wish there were more female heroic figures. Carol Marcus may eventually be such a character, but for this movie, she was strictly bikini filler.
• I wish Admiral Christopher Pike had ended up as he did in the original timeline, badly injured and in a wheelchair. It would have opened up the original pilot, The Menagerie, as a possible storyline.
• If you read the credits, they mention George and Winona Kirk. That would have been a neat trick had George Kirk not been killed in the first movie. After looking on the internets, it turns out they were snippets that Kirk heard  when he woke up from his death nap. 
• James Dohohan's son, Christopher, got a credited role as the transporter officer. He played the same role in the first movie but wasn't credited. 

We've seen the movie twice now, both at dinner/movie venues. I just love the fact that we can get our reserved seats online, and we no longer have to show up an hour before the movie just to get our favorite seats. We've also been going to night movies (we used to only go to afternoon showings -- fewer people). Now that the summer has started, with afternoon temperatures in the 110's, it's not longer life- or epidermal-threatening to see a movie.

Live long and prosper...

The Avengers

 We saw The Avengers the other day. I think the movie runs for two hours and 15 minutes, and the last half of the movie makes the first half worth it (a lot of character development, not usually my favorite part of the movie). 

• Robert Downey Jr: I wonder what it must have been like, being a "regular size guy" acting against such huge muscley slabs of man meat. No doubt, his character was as kick-ass as all of them, and his acting is easily on the order of ten times everyone else on the screen, but still.
• I still see Thor as Captain Kirk's father.
• The airship design, dependent on four rotor blades, the failure of even one of which would bring the huge thing down... they needed to seriously re-think that design. I mean, if three of four airliner engines stop, they can still land the plane.
• The whole lethal bow-and-arrow thing just hasn't been working for me since Legolas did it successfully in FOTR. I don't care if they make them blow up, you'd be better off with a fully automatic gatlin gun.

Overall though I really liked the movie. You can totally tell Joss Whedon directed the movie, with the clever lines and spot-on comedy bits.

Stay through the credits, there is an Easter Egg at the end.

 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

   Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Over the past several weeks, they've been playing all of the Harry Potter movies on cable, and it was nice watching all of them before we went to see The Deathly Hallows Part 2 in the theater. As everyone has been writing, it is a fitting end to the movies. It's also the darkest of all the movies, and it's pretty much open season on high school aged witches and wizards. A shocking number of them are killed defending Hogwarts from Voldemort. No cute singing frogs in this movie. Spoilers after the split...

Super 8

 

Super 8

The trickiest part about having a movie with a cast primarily with child actors is giving them believable lines. I like child actors to speak and behave like real children, and too many movies and TV shows give them lines that would be more fitting for a 50-year-old Shakespearean actor.

This is not a problem with Super 8. All of the Goonies-like young actors are very real and believable.

There is a monster in this movie, and he (she?) is extra-terrestrial, but it hardly matters. They could have made it a bear or a runaway circus elephant and it would have worked up until the final few minutes of the movie, when some heavy sci-fy was called for.

In fact, I was a bit disapointed at how inconsequential the monster was. Yes, it did provide a source for dramatic conflict and danger, but you never got to get acquainted with it. ET wanted to go home, but in the end, what made the movie so great (and makes us cry decades after we first saw it) was that we actually got to know (and love and somewhat understand) ET. In Super 8, we validated his parking spot and he just left.

I still liked the film, and it did remind me a lot of the Goonies.

X-Men First Class; The Killing

•    We saw X-Men: First Class last week. For some reason,  I was expecting Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in it, at least for a little bit, CGI altered to appear younger. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender did an excellent job portraying Dr. Xavier and Magneto as young men. Their acting and the dramatic building of their relationship couldn't have been done any better had Captain Picard and Gandalf done the parts themselves. I normally would have been turned off by all of the character development, but I was entertained. And Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw served as a believable bad guy to balance out the heroes.
•    We sometimes are a bit leary about watching new shows. We sometimes like them, and then they get cancelled. But we're taking a chance with AMC's The Killing. It's a murder mystery that takes place in Seattle. The lead characters, for whatever reason, remind me of Mulder and Scully from X-Files. Particularly the redheaded female detective (our nickname for her is SourPuss because she's always walking around with a scowl on her face). The show makes Seattle look dark and rainey, I think they're doing it on purpose through a blue filter; the sun hardly shines and it's rained in most of the episodes. Thankfully, it's been picked up for another season.
  
  

Pirates of the Caribbean; The Event; bag lunches

•   We went to see Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides: the story was so-so, but Johnny Depp really has Jack Sparrow totally down. Some of the lines he trades with Penelope Cruz Geoffrey Rush and Ian McShane were very funny. My favorite part of the film though was the soundtrack. The music, especially with the action scenes, was terrific. We sat through the credits for the easter-egg scene at the end, and listening to the end credits music made the wait worth it (the easter-egg scene itself was really short and not all that exciting).
•   NBC has cancelled The Event. The final episode was excellent, and I really want to see more. There were rumors that SyFy may pick it up for a miniseries, but SyFy announced they aren't interested. I'm still holding out hope that someone will pick it up.
• I don't know how I do it, but I spend $30/week at work on food. No, I don't order out. That's hospital cafeteria food I'm spending all that money on. If the food were actually worth $30 (that's about $10 each night that I work), I would just spend it and go on. But the food isn't all that good and I always feel bad after eating it. I had read online about a guy that saved tons of money each year eating the same brown-bag lunch year after year. Nothing fancy, just a peanut butter and jelly sandwiche and some fruit, or maybe a granola bar. I'm starting to brown bag my dinner -- a couple of sandwiches, a fruit cup, cookies, and iced tea. I don't know how long I'll keep up the self-discipline of making lunch before I go to bed, we'll have to see. [Update: the guy mentioned earlier that ate the same lunch every day ended up being Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin. Oh well, the idea is still sound, even if his state is totally imploding these days.]

 

 

Thor, the Rapture...

•  The summer season has begun. I've made a promise this year to be better about seeing movies in the theater, rather than just waiting until they are released as Blu-rays months later. So the first one this year is Thor. I had resisted, because the actor playing Thor also plays George Kirk (James Kirk's father from Star Trek), and I have always had a hard time viewing Star Trek actors out of Star Trek. But this movie was pretty good. The story was ok, and Natalie Portman is in it which is a plus. The scenes of Thor's home planet, Asgard, and the planet of the Frost Giants were excellent. I think it's the best of the set-up movies for upcoming Marvel movies.
•  Well the Rapture was a bit of a wash-out, wouldn't you say? Of course, we weren't at all worried. But we did talk about the possibility that there might not be a whole lot of people around the day after the rapture, and that we should fill up the gas tank and did a bit of groceries. I think it's more interesting to think about all of the people out there that are feeling so bad about themselves and the world they live in that the Rapture turns out to be a real thing. I read an article that lots of folks have cashed out retirement funds, kids' college funds and life savings all looking forward to going to heaven. I mean, how DO you spell putz?
  
  
  

Hereafter...

•  We watched Hereafter on Netflix. It was sold as a mystery sci-fi thriller, which set me up for a bit of a let down to be honest. It's the story of three characters who each have their own unique experiences with death. Matt Damon plays an unwilling psychic. His life intersects with those of a young woman who survives the tsunami of 2004, and a young boy whose twin brother is killed.
            At first I couldn't figure out where the movie was going, but eventually I thought it was a good story, but not at all sci-fi or thrilling. The scene where the young boy seeks out Damon's character was nicely done, and yes it made me shed a few tears but I tend to do that quite easily when watching movies. The only thing that threw me was expecting a movie like Bourne Identity. After I got over this, I ended up thinking it was pretty good.
•  
  If plans work out, in August, we'll be flying from Phoenix to the East Coast at the annual beach trip. Of course, just as soon as we started doing online research for booking the flights, on the very day we hit CLICK, a big hole opened up on a Southwest flight from  Tuscon. I mean, literally, as soon as the electric signal went from our laptop to Travelocity, the hole tore open on that flight. In the weeks that follow, we've had cracks throughout airplanes, about a dozen night-shift air traffic controllers have fallen asleep on the job, and the price of gasoline (and thus jet fuel) has gone through the roof. Every time we update our online search for affordable flights, I nervously check for news about a tsunami wiping out Kitty Hawk North Carolina. I mean it is just frakking weird.

Sex In The City; Prince of Persia...

I've enjoyed four days off in a row.
We went to see Sex In The City 2. It was pretty long - about two hours and fifteen minutes - but it didn't seem tedious or boring. As is typical for me, I wanted to strangle Carrie for being a whiny bitch, but I enjoyed the movie none the less. At first, I didn't see the sense for the four of them to be enjoying themselves in a society that doesn't give women the same level of independence as men, but it ended up making sense toward the end of the movie.
The next day, we saw The Prince of Persia. It was an excellent movie. I was hesitant at first, with a movie based on a video game, but the acting was great, the action was exciting, and there was an excellent balance between the heroes and the villains.
Two movies in two days - but then I work four of the next five nights...
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