It really, really brings it : G.I. Joe 2: Retaliation Trailer drops

Yesterday, I tweeted about the teaser to this trailer and how much I enjoyed it. Those tweets elicited quite the response from you all. It seems that a lot of you didn't like the first one at all. On the other hand, a lot of you really dug it.

I personally really enjoyed it.

It was a ton of fun that infused just the correct amount of ridiculousness required of a GI Joe movie.

The first official trailer for the sequel just dropped and not only does it pick up from where it left off, it takes it to a whole new level.  With the addition of the Rock we seem to get a more bad-ass movie not relying on the gimmicks of the special effects themselves. It seems more character focused this time around.

I dig it..I really do.

And it's really good to see Bruce Willis play a bad-ass again.

This should be a ton of fun.....again.

 

 

Posted

It really, really brings it : G.I. Joe 2: Retaliation Trailer drops

Yesterday, I tweeted about the teaser to this trailer and how much I enjoyed it. Those tweets elicited quite the response from you all. It seems that a lot of you didn't like the first one at all. On the other hand, a lot of you really dug it.

I personally really enjoyed it.

It was a ton of fun that infused just the correct amount of ridiculousness required of a GI Joe movie.

The first official trailer for the sequel just dropped and not only does it pick up from where it left off, it takes it to a whole new level.  With the addition of the Rock we seem to get a more bad-ass movie not relying on the gimmicks of the special effects themselves. It seems more character focused this time around.

I dig it..I really do.

And it's really good to see Bruce Willis play a bad-ass again.

This should be a ton of fun.....again.

 

 

Filed under  //  film   nerdiness   pop-culture   tumblrize   xavierpop  
Posted

Awww Hell Yes - MEN IN BLACK 3 Trailer Drops

When Men In Black 3 was announced, I honestly thought it was going to suck. Hard.

The first trailer just dropped and you know what? It looks really good.

Really, Really Good.

Especially the last few seconds.

Don't believe me? Have a gander and judge for yourself.

Official Synopsis:

Men in Black III is once again directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, also of the first two. This newest sequel is said to be set mostly in the year 1969 and involves Agent J (Will Smith) time-traveling back to that year, where he meets up with a young Agent K (Josh Brolin) for some plot involving, most likely, our landing on the Moon. The cast also includes Emma Thompson as Agent Oh, Alice Eve as a young Oh, Bill Hader, Jemaine Clement, Rip Torn and Michael Stuhlbarg. It was shot in 3D and Columbia currently has it scheduled to hit theaters starting May 25th next summer. You can visit the official site: TheMenInBlackSuitsAreReal.com.

Posted

Awww Hell Yes - MEN IN BLACK 3 Trailer Drops

When Men In Black 3 was announced, I honestly thought it was going to suck. Hard.

The first trailer just dropped and you know what? It looks really good.

Really, Really Good.

Especially the last few seconds.

Don't believe me? Have a gander and judge for yourself.

Official Synopsis:

Men in Black III is once again directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, also of the first two. This newest sequel is said to be set mostly in the year 1969 and involves Agent J (Will Smith) time-traveling back to that year, where he meets up with a young Agent K (Josh Brolin) for some plot involving, most likely, our landing on the Moon. The cast also includes Emma Thompson as Agent Oh, Alice Eve as a young Oh, Bill Hader, Jemaine Clement, Rip Torn and Michael Stuhlbarg. It was shot in 3D and Columbia currently has it scheduled to hit theaters starting May 25th next summer. You can visit the official site: TheMenInBlackSuitsAreReal.com.

Posted

Awww Hell Yes - MEN IN BLACK 3 Trailer Drops

When Men In Black 3 as announced, I honestly thought it was going to suck. Hard.

The first trailer just dropped and you know what? It looks really good.

Really, Really Good.

Especially the last few seconds.

Don't believe me? Have a gander and judge for yourself.

Official Synopsis:

Men in Black III is once again directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, also of the first two. This newest sequel is said to be set mostly in the year 1969 and involves Agent J (Will Smith) time-traveling back to that year, where he meets up with a young Agent K (Josh Brolin) for some plot involving, most likely, our landing on the Moon. The cast also includes Emma Thompson as Agent Oh, Alice Eve as a young Oh, Bill Hader, Jemaine Clement, Rip Torn and Michael Stuhlbarg. It was shot in 3D and Columbia currently has it scheduled to hit theaters starting May 25th next summer. You can visit the official site: TheMenInBlackSuitsAreReal.com.

Posted

Awww Hell Yes - MEN IN BLACK 3 Trailer Drops

When Men In Black 3 as announced, I honestly thought it was going to suck. Hard.

The first trailer just dropped and you know what? It looks really good.

Really, Really Good.

Especially the last few seconds.

Don't believe me? Have a gander and judge for yourself.

Official Synopsis:
Men in Black III is once again directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, also of the first two. This newest sequel is said to be set mostly in the year 1969 and involves Agent J (Will Smith) time-traveling back to that year, where he meets up with a young Agent K (Josh Brolin) for some plot involving, most likely, our landing on the Moon. The cast also includes Emma Thompson as Agent Oh, Alice Eve as a young Oh, Bill Hader, Jemaine Clement, Rip Torn and Michael Stuhlbarg. It was shot in 3D and Columbia currently has it scheduled to hit theaters starting May 25th next summer. You can visit the official site: TheMenInBlackSuitsAreReal.com.

Posted

@MovieJay gets down and dirty in his review of Shame

Not since Last Tango In Paris (1971) has a movie been this frank or this mysterious about sex the way Shame is. While there are many sexual situations here, they're not meant to entertain or to titillate us in what is ultimately a brave, challenging character study filled with sadness.

The first shot is an overhead one of Michael Fassbender lying on his back. At first we wonder if his blank face reflects the malaise of Monday-morning-dread. By the end of the film, we wonder if he isn't quite possibly contemplating suicide.

His character is Brandon, a thirty-something guy who's fit and handsome. He lives in a modern, sterilized-looking condo apartment in Manhattan. He works in a building as antiseptic as the one he lives in, but what his job consists of the movie doesn't say. Why? Because it doesn't really matter to Brandon. He's as disconnected from his job as he is from people. A woman's voice - which he ignores - can be heard on his answering machine in the morning. "Brandon, it's me, pick-up...pick-up".

He goes out after work for drinks with his boss, David (James Badge). Do you suppose Brandon counts him as a friend? David's the guy at the bar who tries too hard with women while Brandon is the smoother, more detached and enigmatic one. Even amongst co-workers, Brandon appears to be a loner. The blond at the bar that David had been drooling over picks up Brandon. The sex they have under what appears to be an overpass is hurried and desperate.

Brandon's life is dominated by the need to fulfill just about every occasion with an orgasm. He masturbates in the shower and then again at the office. He hires prostitutes and engages in sex with random strangers. The orgasms he achieves are not a culmination of good feelings originating from desire and intimacy shared with himself or his partners but more in tune with the French idiom "la petite mort" (a small death), the notion of melancholy or something dying inside after expending his life force. Sex is not a pleasurable past-time to Brandon so much as it is an exercise in plumbing.

Sex addiction is relatively new in the landscape of addictions. The debate rages on: Is there such a thing as sex addiction, or is it a cover for deeper issues? We learn from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that in 1987 they classified sex addiction as a mental disorder, though it is downgraded to the level of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The manual lists it as a "miscellaneous sexual disorder" marked by "distress about a pattern of repeated sexual relationships involving a succession of lovers who are experienced by the individual only as things to be used."

Indeed, Brandon experiences many women as 'things to be used', but he is also using himself as well as being used. Watch the flirtation on the train carefully. Brandon's gaze is aggressive. He must have her. But that woman is using him. He's a prisoner of his own self-abuse and self-loathing. His sex is joyless. His needs are insatiable. When he wanders into a gay club, we don't sense that Brandon's gay. He's there out of convenience. He's getting his fix.

Complicating his life is the arrival from the west coast of his younger sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan). Her love and her need for him underlines his fear of love and intimacy as well as his fear of being known. Her presence in the movie brings it life and vitality as Sissy wears her heart on her sleeve while Brandon's dreadful existence is marked by his coldness to others and his predictable cycle of sex-binges and subsequent melancholic hangovers. In one of the most heart-wrenching renditions of a Sinatra tune ever committed to film, Sissy delivers "New York, New York" at a gig o ne night, her face filled with as much grief and pain as Brandon's when he is having sex.

Shame is an appropriate title for this movie. Consider the sequence where a co-worker comes onto Brandon as well as their awkward first date. He tells her he doesn't see the point of marriage and that four months was the longest he's been in a committed relationship. Considering the anti-climax of the scenes between the two, Brandon's not a guy who appears to enjoy his singledom or his privacy so much as he uses them as a cover that conceals deep wounds. We sense these hurts shared between himself and Sissy.

Fassbender and his director, Steve McQueen, are now some kind of dynamic duo after they're first art-house hit in Hunger. In both films, McQueen does a great job of removing artificial techniques. In a lesser movie the voice I quoted earlier would have announced "it's me, it's your sister!", but since Shame treats its audience with intelligence, its characters speak and behave the way real people do. Bad movies condescend and judge. They're all too happy to tell us what will happen, what is happening, and what just happened. Good movies suggest and imply. They allow us space for contemplation. They leave us with more questions than answers.

Shame is a great movie for those reasons, and of course, for its courageous performance from Michael Fassbender. Both he and Carey Mulligan are worthy of Oscar nominations.

You'll read and hear about how Shame is a lot like American Psycho without the grizzly murders or comic affectations.

Not so.

They both occupy a cold, drab Manhattan with sterile interiors, but Shame has much more in common with the grief and loneliness of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango in Paris, the Jack Nicholson character in Mike Nichols' post-Graduate social critique Carnal Knowledge (1971), as well as Neil Labute's In the Company of Men (1997).

 

Shame **** out of 4

Posted

@MovieJay gets down and dirty in his review of Shame

Not since Last Tango In Paris (1971) has a movie been this frank or this mysterious about sex the way Shame is. While there are many sexual situations here, they're not meant to entertain or to titillate us in what is ultimately a brave, challenging character study filled with sadness.

The first shot is an overhead one of Michael Fassbender lying on his back. At first we wonder if his blank face reflects the malaise of Monday-morning-dread. By the end of the film, we wonder if he isn't quite possibly contemplating suicide.

His character is Brandon, a thirty-something guy who's fit and handsome. He lives in a modern, sterilized-looking condo apartment in Manhattan. He works in a building as antiseptic as the one he lives in, but what his job consists of the movie doesn't say. Why? Because it doesn't really matter to Brandon. He's as disconnected from his job as he is from people. A woman's voice - which he ignores - can be heard on his answering machine in the morning. "Brandon, it's me, pick-up...pick-up".

He goes out after work for drinks with his boss, David (James Badge). Do you suppose Brandon counts him as a friend? David's the guy at the bar who tries too hard with women while Brandon is the smoother, more detached and enigmatic one. Even amongst co-workers, Brandon appears to be a loner. The blond at the bar that David had been drooling over picks up Brandon. The sex they have under what appears to be an overpass is hurried and desperate.

Brandon's life is dominated by the need to fulfill just about every occasion with an orgasm. He masturbates in the shower and then again at the office. He hires prostitutes and engages in sex with random strangers. The orgasms he achieves are not a culmination of good feelings originating from desire and intimacy shared with himself or his partners but more in tune with the French idiom "la petite mort" (a small death), the notion of melancholy or something dying inside after expending his life force. Sex is not a pleasurable past-time to Brandon so much as it is an exercise in plumbing.

Sex addiction is relatively new in the landscape of addictions. The debate rages on: Is there such a thing as sex addiction, or is it a cover for deeper issues? We learn from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that in 1987 they classified sex addiction as a mental disorder, though it is downgraded to the level of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The manual lists it as a "miscellaneous sexual disorder" marked by "distress about a pattern of repeated sexual relationships involving a succession of lovers who are experienced by the individual only as things to be used."

Indeed, Brandon experiences many women as 'things to be used', but he is also using himself as well as being used. Watch the flirtation on the train carefully. Brandon's gaze is aggressive. He must have her. But that woman is using him. He's a prisoner of his own self-abuse and self-loathing. His sex is joyless. His needs are insatiable. When he wanders into a gay club, we don't sense that Brandon's gay. He's there out of convenience. He's getting his fix.

Complicating his life is the arrival from the west coast of his younger sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan). Her love and her need for him underlines his fear of love and intimacy as well as his fear of being known. Her presence in the movie brings it life and vitality as Sissy wears her heart on her sleeve while Brandon's dreadful existence is marked by his coldness to others and his predictable cycle of sex-binges and subsequent melancholic hangovers. In one of the most heart-wrenching renditions of a Sinatra tune ever committed to film, Sissy delivers "New York, New York" at a gig one night, her face filled with as much grief and pain as Brandon's when he is having sex .

Shame is an appropriate title for this movie. Consider the sequence where a co-worker comes onto Brandon as well as their awkward first date. He tells her he doesn't see the point of marriage and that four months was the longest he's been in a committed relationship. Considering the anti-climax of the scenes between the two, Brandon's not a guy who appears to enjoy his singledom or his privacy so much as he uses them as a cover that conceals deep wounds. We sense these hurts shared between himself and Sissy.

Fassbender and his director, Steve McQueen, are now some kind of dynamic duo after they're first art-house hit in Hunger. In both films, McQueen does a great job of removing artificial techniques. In a lesser movie the voice I quoted earlier would have announced "it's me, it's your sister!", but since Shame treats its audience with intelligence, its characters speak and behave the way real people do. Bad movies condescend and judge. They're are all too happy to tell us what will happen, what is happening, and what just happened. Good movies suggest and imply. They allow us space for contemplation. They leave us with more questions than answers.

Shame is a great movie for those reasons, and of course, for its courageous performance from Michael Fassbender. Both he and Carey Mulligan are worthy of Oscar nominations.

You'll read and hear about how Shame is a lot like American Psycho without the grizzly murders or comic affectations.

Not so.

They both occupy a cold, drab Manhattan with sterile interiors, but Shame has much more in common with the grief and loneliness of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango in Paris, the Jack Nicholson character in Mike Nichols' post-Graduate social critique Carnal Knowledge (1971), as well as Neil Labute's In the Company of Men (1997).

 

Shame **** out of 4

Posted

@MovieJay's Review of the Immortals

Maybe it's the release date that doesn't favor Immortals since inexplicably it's scoring half the approval rating at rottentomatoes.com that Thor got (that absolutely stupefying and desolate release from late spring). A movie can be an incoherent mess but win favor with critics as well as audiences going into the mindless summer season, but in the fall our senses sharpen and we sink a little deeper into our seats hoping every new release carries with it a chance we'll discover a bonafide best picture nominee.

Sadly, Immortals is not a suitable candidate for that prize, but a critic's got to be honest enough to admit when they feel a tingle for a movie, and holy-raging-iron-bull, Batman, I had a serious tingle running through me for awhile there until finally the weight of all it's preposterousness kept me in like-but-not-love territory.

An astute young woman sitting close to me after the screening gave me a long checklist of assurances that Immortals was pulling a fast one on us. There were "historical inaccuracies" of its tale culled from Greek Mythology of Gods and earthly peasants, Oracles and heroes, searing visuals, and a dastardly King who literally chews up the scenery. So what? There are actually 12 Gods and not 6, as the movie would have us believe?! The horror!

To the degree that Immortals takes liberties, it's hard to feel outraged because it's having too much fun satiating our appetites for new and glorious images at the movies, and on that note it's absolutely breathtaking to sit back and drink in.

It's all so simple: King Hyperion is a big, bad, brooding menace of a man, the kinda guy who does everything out loud, not least of which his heavy breathing in between words he's speaking while chewing on his cud and other things. He's played with relish by Mickey Rourke who, together with his army of vast and faithful CGI compatriots, are about to take over Greece. Until the movie begins and he finds his plans are delayed because of a screenplay that requires him to fetch the hidden Epirus Bow, a weapon that is able to shoot arrows out of thin air. But in order to find it, he'll need to find the Oracle Phaedra, played by Freida Pinto, and will have to fight off a plucky peasant in Theseus (Henry Cavill aka the next Superman), as well as a range of Gods who just can't help themselves from making cameos when they just can't take the suspense any longer.

Hyperion will exploit the Oracles, whose powers can be used to find the bow, and once it's in his possession he'll use it to unleash the Titans in a fight to kill the Gods. The Titans are a frustrated band of blue characters imprisoned in a sadistic state for the last few epochs. Or was it eons? Anyway, they look awfully unhappy at the predicament they're in, and it's a perfectly terrifying and hideous shot of them that tips us off at the beginning of the wild imagination of its director, Tarsem Singh, who made the equally breath-taking The Cell and the even-better The Fall, with Immortals ranking just behind those two.

Given a straightforward David & Goliath-type of swashbuckling adventure, this movie could have been great. Spartacus great. Braveheart great. But interrupting the story of the young, buff, clear-eyed peasant Theseus rallying his people with pure raw energy in a fight for civilization against Hyperion, the misstep here comes with the subplot focusing on the Gods, with Zeus (Luke Evans) making bold pronouncements about how the Gods may never interfere with humans, unless of course things get really bad for the humans, in which case the Gods come swooping down from on-high, an unfortunate place that appears to have no widescreen tv's for them to see up-close what is going on down there. The Gods keep us from really caring about or investing ourselves in the characters on Earth because their appearances undercut the tension in the for ward action of what is at times a powerful and gathering narrative with horrifying implications, brutal fight scenes, and one particular scene of pure evil involving what appears to be a great, big immobile metallic bull with smoke and screams emanating from its nostrils. The movie even gets the romance right, with a very well photographed and sexy scene of intimacy between Phaedra and Theseus, even if it is at least a minute too short.

See this movie for the performances of Mickey Rourke and the star-making vehicle for Henry Cavill and to drink in the beautiful imagery, but don't expect a home run, just a ground-rule double.

Immortals *** out of 4

Posted

@MovieJay Review of My Week With Marilyn

 

"She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence."

The success of My Week with Marilyn lies in the gifts of Michelle Williams in her skillful evocation of those words written by Marilyn Monroe's third and final husband, Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller.

It must be difficult to be charged with playing a symbolic, cultural icon. Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino did admirable work in Norma Jean & Marilyn (1996), but Williams has now set the bar.

I came along a full generation after her passing, so for those like myself we grew up with the legend of Marilyn Monroe. The white dress blowing above her knees above that grate when the subway barrels by underneath. That unforgettable footage of her singing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to JFK.

For those who grew up with her, the nostalgia conjured up by the many faces of Monroe that enticed that generation can be sensed in their voices and particularly in their writing, among the historians and by our more mature film critics who know the feeling first hand. In Roger Ebert's review he writes, "In the early 1950s, my friends and I required only one word to express it: marilynmonroe. It wasn't a name. It was a summation of all we yearned and guessed about some kind of womanly ideal." And Rex Reed from the NY Observer lovingly adds, "you feel like you were there" and "supercolossal charisma and appeal".

You know, that kinda makes me jealous. My generation has Madonna and Britney, J. Lo and Lindsay Lohan, one after the other a copy-of-a-copy, the antithesis of enigmatic, perpetuating themselves on our culture much the same way a corporation does. Suppose we'll gleam the way those guys do that long after those ladies are through?

The film is the recollection of Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a 23 yr-old kid who talks himself into a job at Pinewood Studios in England on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl (1956), directed by Laurence Olivier. They're filming an easy-breezy light comedy with Monroe surrounded by a cast of British acting royalty including the aforementioned Olivier (Kenneth Branagh), as well as Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench). Frustrated with being pigeon-hel d as just another airy blonde, it would be Monroe's second film under the tutelage of acting guru Lee Strasberg's second wife, Paula (Zoe Wanamaker).

Olivier becomes an irascible mess on set as Paula's hold over Monroe with all that new "method acting" stuff gets in the way of him being a director. Olivier eschewed the method and saw acting in more practical terms, as something to be worked at like any other job. Of course he finds Monroe totally irresistible, but she's too much trouble for him. Meanwhile, Thorndike empathizes with the 30 yr-old Monroe, giving her a much-needed thespian mentor on set.

The young Colin is third-assistant director, essentially a glorified gopher. He's fancied by a sweet wardrobe girl named Lucy (Emma Watson), but she's no match for the spell that befalls Colin - indeed, all of the men involved with the pic - when Monroe summons him to keep her company at a cottage the week her husband, Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) flies back state-side. Before this invitation, they will have interacted only a few times on set with Monroe sizing him up immediately as an innocent who she can trust. Colin's in awe of her and in their first scene together we see that beyond the pills and the booze and the many private and public faces, Monroe is a smart person lacking any kind of confidence with an insatiable need for reassurance. She appreciates Clark's kindness and honesty.

Perhaps he reminds her of her lost innocence.

If Colin and Monroe had sex that week, the movie does a good job of only suggesting it after a very lovely scene of the two skinny-dipping when Colin's been summoned back to the cottage where Monroe has locked herself inside her room and won't come out. There's real sweetness in the loneliness of that night as Colin climbs up and into her room through the window, "like Romeo & Juliet", whispers Monroe. The movie shows Colin holding her that night, while the rest is left to our imagination. And that's just perfect, since the overall appeal we have for Michelle Williams in the role is that we find ourselves yearning to hold her, too.

Marilyn Monroe left something to the imagination in a time when that notion was sexy. That idea and how well it's milked to our great satisfaction is what makes My Week with Marilyn one of the very good biopics. It also serves itself well by focusing on a slice of her life instead of the usual ski-slope treatment where biopics tend to find themselves marking every flag down the slope of a celebrity's life.

The three major supporting performances are all Oscar-worthy. Kenneth Branagh is excellent at showing how Olivier practically goes mad on set and is given a wonderful, revealing scene where he shares with Colin the loneliness of feeling older in comparison to the zesty Monroe. Judi Dench wrings some very wise and knowing laughs from the experiences of an actor who has been on many a set. And Eddie Redmayne, so good in The Yellow Handkerchief and Hick, gives his best performance yet as the helplessly-in-love-and-devoted Colin Clark. The rest of the cast shines as well, not least of which Julia Ormond playing Vivien Leigh, Olivier's husband. She's got Colin making sure to report any funny business between her husband and the icon.

But at the center is that inspired performance by Michelle Williams, who indeed brings Marilyn Monroe to life as we've never seen before, capturing in a very tender way the highs and lows, the free-spiritedness and the wonder, the loneliness and troubles that haunted the disturbed young star. Williams is a lock for an Oscar nomination.

Lovely movie. It really does make you feel like you were there.

 

My Week with Marilyn ***1/2 out of 4

Posted