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.)

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

I'd heard that Jupiter Jones was not a good movie. I usually am not really persuaded by ratings on 'Rotten Tomatoes,' so I thought I'd see for myself. But my expectations were really low; after all, here's the synopsis on my DVR:

Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) was born under signs that predicted future greatness, but her reality as a woman consists of cleaning other people's houses and endless bad breaks. Caine (Channing Tatum), a genetically engineered hunter, arrives on Earth to locate her, making Jupiter finally aware of the great destiny that awaits her. Jupiter's genetic signature marks her as the next in line for an extraordinary inheritance that could alter the balance of the cosmos.

My reaction: Wow. This is going to be bad. And the haters were right. This thing is a hot mess. A visually stunning, special-effects masterpiece, but it's a hot mess. The movie starts with Jupiter Jones somberly narrating that she's "[t]echnically speaking... an alien. And from the perspective of Immigration, an illegal one..." Her parents met... blah, blah, blah. Uncomfortable scene where Dad is rubbing Vaseline on Mom's pregnant belly before men burst in, steal his telescope and kill him.

Cue immigration to the US... Jupiter says that she was born in the house of Leo... with Jupiter rising at twenty-three degrees ascendant. This means that she is destined for great things and to find the one true love of her life. Really? I guess that the Wachowskis thought that they were being clever and ironic, introducing it this way, because then we're treated to a too long montage of Jupiter cleaning toilets. Multiple toilets. We are wasting time watching Jupiter clean toilets. And that's just the start, folks.

After I finished the movie, I had 2 thoughts: (1) the special effects looked so realistic, and (2) the movie should have been longer, at least from a narrative standpoint. It's only 127 minutes. They could have used another 30 minutes to flesh out the plot and Jupiter's relationship with the male lead, Caine Wise (Channing Tatum). [Side note: the top 14 grossing action films average 159 minutes.]