Legally Blonde (2001)

I can't believe that it's been over 20 years since Legally Blonde came out! This was such a fun movie. 

If you're not familiar, on the eve of their graduation from college, Elle's (Reese Witherspoon) boyfriend , Warner (Matthew Davis), dumps her because it's time for him to get serious. 'If he's going to be a senator by the time he's thirty, he needs to marry a Jackie, not a Marilyn.' (If you don't know that he's a jerk from this statement alone, then pay closer attention. The fact that he thinks he'd get elected at 30 and is equating himself with JFK... That says it all.)

After consoling herself with throwing a box of chocolates at 'Lucky' from General Hospital, she decides that she's going to prove to Warner that she's serious enough to be his girl friend. That means following him to Harvard Law School. Elle has a 4.0, lots of extracurriculars (she's the president of her Delta Nu chapter) and after diligently studying, got a 179 on her LSAT, which leads to her being admitted to Harvard.

The scene where she first encounters Warner is classic.

World War Z (2013)

What scene was this from, again?

World War Z is an almost-solid science fiction movie. It's definitely fast-paced, with lots of suspense, but there are just too many places where it asks you to suspend logic to make it a good movie. The zombies are definitely creepy (to an extent that I cringe to think of them), but again, there is just so much that I shake my head at that I can't give this more than a 5 out of 10.

Here's my synopsis (and running commentary on plot holes). Since we're currently living through a world-wide pandemic that spreads through respiration and makes people incredibly contagious even when they aren't having symptoms, it's a bit surreal to compare the movie with my experience in the US during COVID-19. (Be prepared for some extra snark related to how people in the move handle their very contagious virus versus the US's response to the coronavirus.) 

Remember Me (2010)

When they advertised Allen Coulter's Remember Me, it was a movie about love. (Watch the trailer here.) Two lonely people -- Tyler (Robert Pattinson) and Ally (Emilie de Ravin) -- who find each other and overcome obstacles like her over-protective father and the reason why Tyler approached her in the first place. I wasn't really excited to see it. Something about it told me that I shouldn't but when I went with my group of friends to the movies, it's what we ended up seeing. Turns out, I was right.

Don't get me wrong. It's well acted and engaging. You root for the couple. You hope that the problems they're facing will get resolved and/or overcome. But, for me, it was soul-crushingly painful to watch.

What the trailers didn't show you is why these two lonely people were lonely. Ally's mother was shot in front of her. Her cop father became hyper vigilant to protect her, to the point that he's smothering her. This I could handle. It's Tyler's family drama that haunted me for days afterward.

Three years before the movie begins, Tyler's older brother, Michael, hung himself and Tyler was the one who found the body. The aftermath of the suicide saw grief break the family apart. Tyler is estranged and angry at his father. He blames Dad for his brother's death and hates Dad for abandoning them emotionally afterwards. The movie is a good and accurate depiction of the open chest wound that suicide leaves behind for every family member. Watching their pain and stifled grief was gut-wrenching, disturbing and something that still hurts, thinking about it almost 7 years later. It overshadowed any romance for me.

If they had just left it at this, then I would have rated the movie about a 7 out of 10. As I said before, it's well-acted and engaging. There are no bad guys or characters you hate (they even paint Dad in his prideful misery in a sympathetic way). But then there was the ending. The stupid, manipulative, insulting ending. That ending is why I only gave the film a 3 out of 10.

Right when things were looking up for the pair, and things are finally getting better between father and son, Tyler drops by Dad's office. It just happens to be located in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  It was an unexpected visit so Dad is in a meeting, so Tyler waits. It's easy to imagine what happened after.

So, when they all were finally starting to move on and heal, not only do they have the scars of those previous deaths (Tyler's brother's and Ally's mother's), but they also get to weep over his senseless death, too. I guess that's why they named the movie 'Remember Me.'

I really wish I didn't.

My Rating: 3/10

Links:
IMDB page for the movie
Wikipedia page for the movie

Reviews:
AV Club review
Entertainment Weekly - I'm Still Not Over ... The twist ending of 'Remember Me'
Plugged In review
Roger Ebert review

A Snarky Blow-by-Blow Retelling of 'Noah' (2014)

Our movie begins. Foreboding music (drums mostly) accompanies its beginning narration.

In the beginning there was nothing...
We see an image of the serpent, slithering forward.
Temptation led to sin...
Image of the apple (even though the forbidden fruit *wasn't* an apple, except in religious tradition), a hand picking it, sound of someone eating it
Cast out of Eden, Adam and Eve had three sons:
CAIN, ABEL and SETH.
Shadowplay of Cain killing Abel
Cain killed Abel
and fled to the East,
where he was sheltered by a band of fallen angels:
The Watchers.
Huge mishapen disjointed rock creatures (there's no way that these things would legitimately live if they were real)
These Wachers helped Cain's descendants
build a great industrial civilization.
Say what? Since when was the technology of Noah's era industrial?
Elizabethan-looking city grows and grows (like there were that many people...)
It reminds me of a plague.
Cain's cities spread wickedness, (Cain's still alive then?)
devouring the World.
The blight of Cain's people spread across the land (that looks a lot like Pangaea, something that broke apart 175M years ago)
Only the descendants of Seth
defend and protect what is left of Creation.
Today, the last of Seth's line becomes a man. (What about Lamech's other sons and daughters?)
The action starts...

Encino Man (1992)

Back in 1992, there was a movie about a nerdy boy, Dave (Sean Astin) who yearns to be popular. He decides that having a pool will make him cool and so he starts digging the ditch and uncovers a frozen Cro-Magnon man. He and his buddy, Stoney (Pauly Shore), decide to thaw the floe of ice with heat lamps. It gets to the point where it breaks while the boys are at school and, without any type of resuscitation, the Cro-Magnon iceman (Brendan Fraser) wakes up.

The boys proceed to give the iceman a name, Link, and after teaching him a few phrases, they decide he should go to high school with them. (Because someone illiterate and who barely speaks English would do really well there.) 

Of course, registering him is no problem and everyone at school thinks that he's totally cool, no matter what ridiculous thing he does. Link is a quick study in modern English and in his spare time, he hangs out with Stoney, so there's tons of Pauly Shore's bro-isms. In the end, Dave and Stoney get just as popular as Link, Dave gets the girl he's been crushing on and Link's Cro-Magnon girlfriend appears. Everyone lives happily ever after.

Back in 1992, I skipped this movie. Pauly Shore was nothing but a doofus and I had no interest in watching Brendan Fraser act like a caveman. I came across the movie recently, when they first are meeting Link, so I decided to record it and watch it from the beginning. Maybe it would be humorous. After all, it made about 300% of its original budget and I remember it being popular among the 'it' crowd.

Was it humorous? Not really, at all.
Had I forgotten it existed until I saw it on TV? Yes, I did.
Did I fast forward through much of the movie? Yes.
Was Brendan Fraser enjoyable to watch as Link? Definitely.
Do they need to resurrect this movie or keep it in the public's consciousness? No, definitely not.

Pauly Shore was a novelty spawned by MTV.  I never found him particularly amusing or endearing, but this was one of his most successful movies -- most likely because it didn't *star* him and it starred Brendan Fraser, whose unabashed glee is what made me watch any of it. Frankly, I fast-forwarded about half the movie, mainly the parts that didn't involve Link.

 My Rating: 2/10

Links:
IMDb page
Chris and Elizabeth Watch Movies Review
Cinemablend.com - Wait, Encino Man 2? Here's What Pauly Shore Says

Jack Reacher (2012)

Jack Reacher starts with a man with a smashed thumb making bullets interspersed with a man driving a white van. Man in the van is wearing gloves, nondescript brown shoes, average pants. He drives over some cones to park (I wonder if he put them there to save his spot) and then pays the meter, buying 30 minutes. The man has a sniper rifle.

When we see his face, I recognize him as Jai Courtney, Bruce Willis's son from Die Hard. He calmly puts on his sunglasses and proceeds to shoot people: a man on a bench, who looks like he's waiting for someone, and 4 women walking in various directions, one carrying a little girl.

By the time the police are on the scene, the shooter is long gone. The lead detective, Emerson (David Oyelowo), discovers a shell casing in one of the cracks in the cement and also, because of the crushed cones, thinks to check the meter. This yields a quarter with a usable fingerprint; it identifies James Barr. When they raid his house to arrest him, they find the brown shoes, the license plate (PA CHC 6785) and matching bullets. The DA, Alex Rodin (Richard Jenkins), who never takes cases unless he can win them, takes this one. In cases like this, he always pursues the death penalty.

When Emerson interviews Barr, he tells him that "the DA is wondering if Barr's going to walk like a man or cry like a pussy."  Friendly interview this is not. They offer him life if he confesses or the death penalty if he doesn't. Barr takes the paper and writes something, but it's not what they expected: GET JACK REACHER. The camera pans and the man they've arrested (Joseph Sikora) is *not* the man we saw shoot those people.

Noah (2014)

General synopsis: a re-imagining of the biblical story of Noah to become a blockbuster epic with no faith behind it and lots of rock monsters. Biblically accurate it is not and despite what others might write, is not a good movie.

It's interesting reading reviews of the movie. Despite its departure from the source material, many thought it was a good film. My friends and I (a group of about 10 of us) gathered for movie night and watched it. Several times throughout the movie, various people muttered about how terrible it was and several times, someone asked why we were still watching it. Even when I take religion out of it, it's still a bad movie. Yes, it was visually stunning, and yes, the acting was well-done, but the basic story-line, Noah's bat-crazy ideas and the cliches, plus the ridiculous rock monsters, make this movie one that I tell people to stay away from.

I'm going to preface my review by saying that, for the most part, I don't mind movies which are irreverent to Christianity and/or the Bible. I personally love Dogma and Saved!, because I think the message in both is about having the right motivations, not just a dogmatic following of rules. I could care less about the director's intent behind The Golden Compass. The way South Park skewers religious hypocrisy is great. Bruce Almighty... Evan Almighty... Oh, God. You Devil. The TV series Supernatural's angels storyline. Joan of Arcadia. Even Touched by an Angel or Highway to Heaven. I don't mind the non-traditional depictions of God and/or angels. What I do mind are movies which advertise as if they are the original story but then take major artistic license with it. They leave the bare bones of the story, with everything else some Hollywood executive's fevered dream. (Whoever green-lit this must have had pneumonia.)