The Official Review Thread of 2011

[dws1982]

I've seen all of the Pixar movies with my nephew, and I still think the original Cars is worlds better than Monster's Inc and Finding Nemo. The way Cars touches on the urbanization of America is pretty interesting, I think. Not a great movie, and I don't have much interest in the sequel, especially since it focuses on Mater.

[The Original BJ]

Sigh. I guess Pixar had to crash and burn at some point.

I've been quite the fan of Pixar's output over the past decade and a half. I even liked the original Cars -- though it was certainly the weakest of the studio's films (until yesterday), I liked its heart, visuals, and characters enough to make it, for me, more of a slight dip in Pixar's quality output than an outright disaster.

That's not how I feel about Cars 2. In fact, this sequel doesn't even feel like a Pixar movie -- it feels like another studio's direct-to-DVD spin-off. And I think the film fails in some pretty obvious ways.

To start with, I think it was a terrible decision to elevate Mater from supporting sidekick to protagonist. For god's sakes, he's in more of the film than even Lightning McQueen! I thought Larry the Cable Guy's character was entertaining enough as second banana in the first film, but he's just too annoying, and too one-note a character, to headline this movie. Furthermore, the film basically abandons all the other characters from the first Cars, and so what we get is something akin to a Toy Story sequel without any of the supporting cast. And leaving behind Radiator Springs -- a milieu this Route 66 junkie found most appealing in the first film -- seals the deal: most of what I liked about the first Cars has been expunged for Cars 2.

But the most important thing missing is the heart. Many of the most memorable moments in Pixar's films have been of the lump-in-the-throat variety: "When She Loved Me" in Toy Story 2, EVE trying to wake WALL-E, the marriage montage in Up, the finale of Toy Story 3. This is the first Pixar movie in a while (maybe ever?) not to bring a tear to my eye, or even attempt anything as poignant as "Our Town" or the moment McQueen drives off the tracks to help Doc Hudson in the first Cars. The emotional heft we're used to getting from Pixar is sadly absent here.

And even on a narrative level, I think the film falls well below the studio's standards. Although many earlier Pixars contained chase/action sequences, they were always used to further the story rather than detract from it. Cars 2 is wall to wall noise, full of chase sequences that go on and on, in a really thin plot that is basically a kiddie version of a James Bond movie. I've never found much of interest in the James Bond series, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised I didn't much care for this. And it's pretty obvious who the villain is, right?

The visuals are, as to be expected, impressive, with foreign locales such as Tokyo, Paris, London, and the Italian riviera created with great beauty and wit. But certainly nothing is on par with the "drive" in the first Cars, to say nothing of even more visually imaginative moments in Pixar's greater pictures.

I think reviews, including my own, are probably harsher than necessary, because we've all come to expect so much from Pixar and it's tough to see something this disappointing from a team that has given you so much pleasure. This could very well be the first Pixar film since the inception of the Animated Feature category not to receive a nomination; it could even be the first Pixar film ever to receive no nominations at all. Certainly Pixar won't be in the running to win a fifth consecutive Animated Feature prize, though perhaps that's for the better. It's probably time somebody else had a shot at the gold. I have no doubt the studio will be back in the running again soon.

[anonymous1980]

THE TREE OF LIFE
Cast: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Fiona Shaw.
Dir: Terrence Malick.

This film did to me what 99 out of 100 Masses and other religious ceremonies try but fail to do: Move me spiritually. It is not EXACTLY a religious film by any means but it does contain many religious themes and imagery. It is one of the major themes tackled in this film both very intimate and personal yet also wildly ambitious and epic, along with love and the nature of existence. Lots of heady themes as it places the intimate drama of what really is an average suburban family with a mother, father and three boys living in Texas in the context from the creation and the evolution of the universe and the planet to the present day. It contains beautiful, stunning visuals and cinematography and remarkable performances from the cast including Brad Pitt, giving his one of his career-best performances. The real star of this film is writer-director Terrence Malick who masterfully and poetically essays all these big, bold themes in ways that will take paragraphs to tackle, describe and dissect. This film move me and got me misty-eyed in some parts in a way I really can't begin to describe in this paragraph. It's not only the best film of 2011 so far, it's probably also the best film of this century so far, if I'm so bold to declare it. Be forewarned: It is not a film for everybody. I can see somebody hating it. But it is definitely NOT a film to be dismissed.

Oscar Prospects: Deserves nominations for Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Pitt, McCracken), Supporting Actress (Chastain), Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Art Direction, Costume Design, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Visual Effects.

Grade: A

[Sabin]

Everyone that I saw Beginners with was either crying or about to. It's a wonderful film with a few problems. The film's hipster-arty progression doesn't allow for some of the solitary moments I needed, like that between McGregor and his father in his final moments or Plummer's lover after the fact. There are a few too many Wes Anderson-y detachment-cop-outs that lop-side the film too far towards McGregor's [less interesting] relationship with Melanie Laurent, who is admittedly rather wonderful. But this is an incredibly playful movie about grief, a very personal one, and a very human one. I found myself damn near loving every moment of this film and absolutely every moment of Christopher Plummer's performance which is destined for Oscar consideration.

[OscarGuy]

BJ, the blue lines are called lens flares. It's something a great cinematographer usually avoids unless it adds a certain novelty to a specific scene. It's certainly nothing that should be prevalent. In the many scenes they were used, they were used to distraction. The scene at the train station was the most annoying and the closing scene ones were just obnoxious. A friend of mine said he read an interview with J.J. Abrams after he was criticized for his use of the artificially-created lens flares in Star Trek that he learned his lesson about using them. Obviously not.

I have a lot to say about this film, though I do come down heavily on the negative side. I haven't written my review, but several elements of it have already coalesced in my mind, so it should be an easy write. And I don't really think Super 8 falls into the District 9/Inception mold. First, I think Inception falls more into the Dark Knight mold and still would have benefited from the new rules. Matter of fact, I think Super 8 falls into the Star Trek mold. Star Trek was heavily talked about two years ago as a Best Picture nomination contender. Many progs put it in as a certain nominee. It was popular with a lot of critics and made buckets of money at the box office. But, when it all came down to the final tally, the Academy could only see its way to nominate two science fiction films, not three. Avatar and District 9 were the choices. Avatar is debatable, but District 9 was clearly the better choice (and some would even say, and I'd probably agree, that it was District 9 that kept Star Trek out of the final 10). Now, as a film that wouldn't make it into the new rules set, sure a District 9 comparison is probably apt, but I really don't think they feel similar enough to justify it.

[The Original BJ]

I very much agree with Sabin's take on Super 8: there's about half of a really good summer movie in here (maybe two-thirds, if I'm feeling generous). And then it basically combusts.

I'm sure your mileage may vary with respect to this movie depending on if you think J.J. Abrams has crafted an homage to "classic Spielberg," or if he's just ripping off better movies. At the beginning, at least, I was happy to embrace the former. Sure, there were a lot of familiar Spielbergian elements (a young boy protagonist, living in suburbia, with a parent missing), but I felt they were presented in a way that didn't feel stale (that opening shot is a heartbreaker), and the first chunk of the movie moves along very quickly. I thought the kids were really fun, too -- obnoxious but in a way that felt endearing and completely believable rather than precocious and movie-phony. And all of the filmmaking scenes are charmers, little love letters to the joy of making movies.

As one would expect from a Spielberg picture, eventually the supernatural arrives, and I thought this portion of the film worked as well. The train accident is a great set piece, really gripping but also with dramatic weight to it -- it really feels like the kids are in actual danger here, rather than just a blockbuster action sequence. And the less-is-more unraveling of the strange events that follow is fraught with nicely handled suspense. The characters seem to be responding to chaos in their town with actions that make some sense (as opposed to, you know, in a Michael Bay movie), and it's nice that we don't see the shark (wait, I mean creature!) until we absolutely need to.

But, as with a lot of movies that slowly dole out information, less-is-more starts to become just less. The first real missed opportunity for narrative juice comes when the boys finally view their film footage of the train accident. You'd assume that the footage would reveal a detail or piece of information that would shift the story in a different direction. But instead, it shows us basically something we already know. Then, there's some archival footage that ostensibly provides a backstory to the events that transpire in the film, but I didn't think this propelled the story forward in an interesting way either.

When the town sort of becomes a war zone, things fly off the rails a bit -- at this point I wanted to take back my initial reaction, that the town as a whole was behaving somewhat realistically in the face of crisis, because it just becomes typical blockbuster movie chaos from this point on. And the encounter between our young hero and the creature is truly baffling. The script doesn't do an adequate job of establishing the creature's motivation (or at least, an interesting motivation), and so the entire point of this scene (and by extension, the movie) feels at best muddled, at worst ludicrous. By the time our characters reach their teary-eyed ending (in a scene obviously lifted from an earlier Spielberg classic), I wasn't at all sure what the movie was supposed to be selling thematically, but I knew I wasn't buying.

Two minor things also bothered me. First, I was somewhat troubled by the way the film places blame on Ron Eldard's character -- I don't want to get into spoiler territory, but there could have been a tweak in one of the story's details that would allow the audience to understand Kyle Chandler's anger toward him much better. When reconciliation comes, it feels phony, because Eldard is so obviously not at fault. Second, the locket stuff represents sentimentality at its worst, and should have been completely excised. (And the ending bit was the worst.)

And can someone explain the appeal to me of blue lines running through the screen? I think it looks hideous.

I feel like I've actually undersold the movie, because it has a lot of pleasures in its first chunk, and is certainly a classier, smarter-than-usual summer flick. But I found this to be significantly inferior to the film that seemed to fit that bill last summer, Inception.

It's interesting that Oscar announced its Best Picture rule-change just after the release of this film, because I think it's movies like this that will suffer the most. Many prognosticators assumed this would make it in Best Picture, taking what has been called the District 9/Inception "spot" in a ten-wide field, as if such a spot exists. Maybe, with ten nominees, Super 8 would have made it. But now, I have a hard time seeing this landing anywhere above the techs, though it should do well down-ballot, as high-class popcorn often does.

[Sabin]

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)

This is one of the worst films I had a wonderful time during. There is so much in this film that is as lazy and inexcusable as anything Woody Allen has ever done, Travel Porn Phase of his career or not. It refuses to take any kind of full advantage of his concept and feels like a not terribly great short story from his past. But like the movie from The Purple Rose of Cairo, it serves a very specific purpose.

I can't defend it. I don't want to. If you don't enjoy it, I completely understand...but I'm not there yet.

The film might actually be intolerable were it not cued to Owen Wilson's reactions. He is the best stand in for Woody Allen ever. Who knew?

[Sabin]

by anonymous1980 » Sat Jun 11, 2011 8:09 am
But I do think Super 8 bears very little resemblance to The Goonies in that the kid characters are better written and better performed. They never cross the line to too annoyingly obnoxious or too annoyingly precocious which The Goonies very much often does.

They absolutely cross the line into obnoxious or annoyingly precious which Super 8 as a film very much does too. We did this on Twitter and I don't mean this in an antagonistic way, but if you don't see how this film is very similar to The Goonies then I don't see how we can really discuss this further. It's incredibly similar to The Goonies. Even the first half which I like quite a bit has a sense of manic adventure that is The Goonies to a T. It's just very sharp about it. The second half IS The Goonies. Loud kids talking over each other, manically edited, no human connection, emotionless, badly-structured, bad ending, confusing villain motivations...It. Is. The Goonies.

[anonymous1980]

I just saw The Goonies for the first time last year. Clearly too old to enjoy it, but I saw it. It's cute. It's also basically loud, bickering kids talking over each other for the entire film.

The Goonies is actually a childhood favorite of mine. The last time I rewatched it as an adult, it didn't age too well for me. As you said, loud, bickering kids. But I do think Super 8 bears very little resemblance to The Goonies in that the kid characters are better written and better performed. They never cross the line to too annoyingly obnoxious or too annoyingly precocious which The Goonies very much often does.

[anonymous1980]

THE HANGOVER PART II
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Tambor, Justin Bartha, Jamie Chung, Sasha Barrese, Mason Lee.
Dir: Todd Phillips.

When I first heard about the news, I thought to myself, "How the hell can you make a sequel to The Hangover without basically remaking the entire movie?" It turns out, they did and just moved it to a different location, this time Bangkok. I thought the first one was pretty funny (but far from the FUNNIEST EVER exaltation it got from some quarters). This one is pretty much the same movie, only less funny. Some amusing parts here and there (the photos during the end credits was again the funniest bit) but at best simply a distracting time waster. It's really too bad since the cast has appeal and Phillips is starting to show signs of a talented filmmaker.

Oscar Prospects: None.

Grade: D+

[Sabin]

There are two reviews that I could write about Super 8. One of them is halfway through the film and the other is at the end.

Halfway through Super 8, I thought I was watching a scrappy little movie that was in love with the best of Spielberg, that understood Spielberg fully even though it wasn't quite on the same level. Take the opening scenes for instance and how heavy-handed they are. At times it looked like a Rob Reiner movie with a nonetheless excellent eye for detail. To put it mildly, Super 8 gives anybody who was ever young and in love and in love with the movies a heart boner. And I cannot describe the out-loud laughter I found myself braying through the moviemaking scenes. They are adorable. And speaking of adorable, Elle Fanning creates such an incredible impression in this film. This girl has the poise of an actress twice her age. It's a fantastic performance that the film utterly lets down, but she (more so than her also quite talented sister) will be around for a long time. The first half of the film is a model of taut screenwriting, setting up and paying off, not terribly inspired, but very efficient and ultimately enjoyable. I liked it a lot, and I couldn't wait to tell my parents about it.

And now we're at the end, and I'm probably going to tell them not to bother. I do like Super 8 for much of it but it wouldn't really be fair to describe why it's such a let-down. It goes from evoking Spielberg to evoking Donner evoking Spielberg. Now, I just saw The Goonies for the first time last year. Clearly too old to enjoy it, but I saw it. It's cute. It's also basically loud, bickering kids talking over each other for the entire film. That's all that the second half of Super 8 is. Loud, bickering kids talking their way from one set piece to another occasionally interrupted by an explosion or a cheap TV trick. It is an emotionless, chaotic, loud bore. The [not sure what to reveal here] is so confusing I'm not terribly sure what was going on, but I do know that I did not care about anything that wasn't these kids, and the farther along it went the less I cared about what I was seeing. I think everybody who sees this movie will get uninvolved around the same time roughly. I would never tell anybody to not see this movie. Aside from some focus issues, some bad pulls, and a plague of terrible black-on-dark color scheme near the end which creates a sense of visual muddiness, it's wonderfully crafted. If someone wants to evoke Spielberg, all the power to them. Can't do much better in my book. Or his, which Abrams clearly read because there are scenes that are straight-lifted from the man's oeuvre, and none of them as good.

J.J. Abrams has reveals himself as a master showman who can't quite finish a performance. He excels at development and intrigue up until the second half of the movie, and on television that's precisely where we can see a promo for the next week's episode. I like Super 8 quite a bit. It had me at the beginning and for roughly the first half, but it is definitely a case of diminishing returns.

[anonymous1980]

SUPER 8
Cast: Joel Courtney, Kyle Chandler, Elle Fanning, Ron Eldard, Noah Emmerich, Gabriel Basso, Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills.
Dir: J.J. Abrams.

This is director J.J. Abrams homage to Spielberg films of the late 1970's/early 1980's tackling many of their recurring themes and archetypes and it by and large mostly works (Though does it count as an homage if the guy you're paying homage to is co-producing it? Oh, well. Whatever.) The film itself is really basically a coming-of-age family drama but with a giant monster (or is it?) on the loose. The film also works because of the performances of newcomer Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning (the superior actress of the Fanning sisters, IMO) and great supporting performances from the adults and the other kids. Apart from a few minor quibbles here and there, it's one of the best films of the year so far, for me.

Oscar Prospects: It could be take the summer blockbuster spot of the Best Picture nominations but it will depend on how the rest of the year goes. It's a strong contender for Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score and Film Editing.

Grade: A-

[Sabin]

This is going to be a very long, Tree of Life-style take on X-Men: First Class. As an exercise in summer blockbuster filmmaking, it does not warrant the amount of thought I'm going to give this. It's scope is as broad as its emotional reservoir is shallow, its zips along more like a montage than a feature, and it does a lot of things very poorly. But I have a lot to say about it coming from my own personal journey as a fairly hardcore fan of X-Men for going on twenty years now. So, feel free to bail now with the knowledge that my overall impression of the film is that it's pretty disposable, very disappointing, but might end up being better than most movies this summer, if that's any kind of praise...

...

...today, I've been trying to think of a dynamic between hero and villain that is as intricately linked as that between Professor Charles Xavier and Magneto. The only two that come close in my mind are Batman and The Joker, but there is something and intentionally unspecific about The Joker. We don't know what the nature of him or their relationship is beyond the surface. In some incarnations, The Joker killed Batman's parents. In others, Batman is responsible for The Joker being who he is. It's up to the whims of the writer. This is not the case with Xavier and Magneto. Martin Luther King/Malcolm X. There you go. It's been said a lot of times, we needn't waste any more words. It's a cliché but it's very potent stuff. Two old men using younger men to wage their ideological wars, and the best stories involving the two of them have engaged a perspective on the selfishness between the both of them.

The screenplay to X-Men: First Class is so overstuffed that if there are ten scenes that last more than a single minute, I'd be astonished. Nobody really gets what they need on the page, and for the most part much of the personas are delivered through vamping. However, it cannot be overstated enough how unexpectedly inspired the casting of Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy is in these roles. They create indelible impressions of these characters as younger men. Especially James McAvoy in the best performance I've seen him give to date. He has studied the cadences of Patrick Stewart and effortlessly conveys him as a younger man. And even though this film is so quick and truly offers them little by way of inspired scenes together that watch them grow together from idealists into embittered ideological rivals, the two actors have done their research and make the most out of every moment shared between them. Again, especially McAvoy who creates an arc out of thin air. Magneto's arc is easy, but Xavier goes from picking up girls in the bars of academia to truly engaging in his role as "Professor", which is validated by his relentless focus in every scene, as a character who seemingly services as therapist throughout the film, he's just mesmerizing. Were I not such a fan, I think I'd have the same impression. As a fan, I can absolutely overlook his full head of hair, just as I could overlook the casting of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

I'm going to use that as a segue into my next point. Wolverine is a little guy. That's how he was originally envisioned. A little guy with an overcompensating swagger, a tiny ball of rage and energy that was later fleshed out into a fallen samurai. But I can overlook that detail just as I can McAvoy's hair or Spider-Man having webs he doesn't have to manufacture. I can even overlook this specific re-mythologizing of the X-Men Mythos, these characters, these new origins...but that doesn't change the fact that it's a super wonky re-mythologizing! The central idea of this origin story is to center the film about the relationship between Xavier and Magneto, and the usage of such B, C, and D list characters shouldn't get in the way. As faceless soldiers, Havok, Banshee, and Darwin certainly fit that bill. They don't do much or make much of an impression. Ultimately, that is a huge downfall with this film because the climax of the film largely involves students with nary a single personality trait. Who cares which ones live or die? We haven't been given a reason to care. Additionally, the two characters we do care about are either in the process of reading peoples' minds from afar OR engaging in a subversive ideology and becoming the evil which created him. How the fuck is that going to play to the cheap seats on a Friday night?

There was a 50%+ drop in female attendance opening weekend for X-Men: First Class, which is largely being attributed to the loss of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. I'd be fascinated to know what audiences as a whole thought of this film, which is largely devoid of a cohesive emotional through-line. I could feel the audience's boredom with the Bay of Pigs situation. With Wolverine, you know what you're going to get: flawed but honorable hero struggling with personal demons overcoming the system. That works! X-Men: First Class plays like a very good mini-series, the bulk of which was forcibly lost in translation. One gets the impression that Matthew Vaughn didn't have much say in the script. I will give him credit for some swanky fun montage sequences. The man can certainly do that very well. And for making 132 mins zip by faster than two Thors, that is saying something. But the script to this film is pretty terrible. The opening prologue features a concentration camp scene, the meeting of Xavier and Mystique as children, and then a truly shitty scene where young Magneto uses his powers for the second time under duress after Hans Schmidt (Kevin Bacon) shoots his mother. The wrongheadedness of these scenes completely upends the rest of the film, but I'd like to speak of a recent phenomenon of comic book movies going dark for a moment...

Lots of reviews cited The Dark Knight as basically Heat but with Batman. This is a misreading of the Batman mythology, one that always read like Heat but with Batman. It's probably the most honest translation of text to screen for the medium. At some point in the 1980's, Chris Claremont reimagined Magneto as said ideological counterpoint to Charles Xavier, and introduced him as a Holocaust survivor. This was an incredibly subversive move at the time, because ultimately it ties the act of witnessing genocide with survivor's guilt and reframed Magneto's dogma as one of "Never Again". Even though it was done so as to reform Magneto and bring him into a role of leadership and tolerance (which did happen for some time for reasons ultimately not worth getting into), many people at Marvel were uncomfortable with the idea of a Holocaust-surviving Jew being one of their greatest villains, so they painted him of gypsy blood. As if it's all right for a gypsy who survives the Holocaust to become a villain, but not a Jew. Magneto would go on to reclaim his Jewry at some point in the 90's, and his role in the Marvel Universe has been ever in flux. There are few characters who have died and returned more. Ultimately because it is impossible to say whether or not Magneto is right or not (and one writer brilliantly killed off Magneto only to turn him into a Ché Guvera figure lining the T-Shirts of young mutant punks who clearly never paid much attention to the man's life), his role as a Holocaust survivor is an empowering one because he is using his experiences for what he perceives as good. So, that's all well and good...

...opening up a comic book movie with a scene from the Holocaust is kinda wrong. It's the same thing as killing off a black character only to have his white friend avenge him. The best intentions wrapped in the wettest of blankets. I think I prefer Bryan Singer's mutant Hogwarts "It Gets Better Campaign" to what Matthew Vaughn more sleekly and stylishly does, but the manner in which the first X-Men movie begins is far stronger. We see less and it leaves more open to the imagination. It forces us to look at the grown man and wonder what might have happened to him. Vaughn & co leave nothing to the imagination. We see what Magneto was put through at the hands of the Nazis, which reinforces the image of the villainous Schmidt who will lose his accent and become American entrepreneur Sebastian Shaw. Putting aside how unspeakably shitty Magneto's first scene with Schmidt/Shaw is, wouldn't it be far more prudent to stage Shaw as a mutant profiteer counterpoint to Magneto and Xavier by introducing him later, and ultimately have Magneto learn along the way that his old foe is in fact his new one? Isn't there more drama and surprise in that? Instead, we start the film hating Kevin Bacon for a reason he cannot possibly top later on in the film. Starting WWIII is absolutely not as evil as killing a young Jewish boy's mother in front of him in a concentration camp.

Wesley has said time and time again "Fuck, J.J. Abrams", and I think his reasons for doing so is that J.J. Abrams' incarnation of Star Trek is for the most part a fundamental misreading of Gene Roddenberry's text (though to be fair, Gene thought the direction that Star Trek: The Next Generation was headed in was a betrayal as well after they booted him off the show). I don't think that X-Men: First Class is a misreading of the text. Regardless of how goofy this version is, the X-Men did at one point have a CIA liaison and operate under a veil of secrecy in a Cold War existence. The film may not do that well and instead opt for the kind of escapism that a Cold War America would enjoy with its espionage fun and games, but it's heart is in very much the right place. That being said, I almost would prefer if the film would completely divorce itself from X-Men Boilerplate and re-imagine itself freshly as Abrams' Star Trek did by ultimately disposing of all of its middle-aged "saggage" (Sag & Baggage) and just be...well, fun. X-Men: First Class is occasionally fun, but it's too busy trying to do the self-important stuff that X-Men movies always try to do. X-Men movies are always about the fate of humanity at the hands of its oppressed evolutionary successors. And this one is too...then why don't I feel anything?

Singer's movies are giant messes, but they are heartfelt. Matthew Vaughn doesn't really do that. There is a beautiful scene shared between McAvoy and Fassbender where the former engages the happier corner of the latter's memory to open a window a new manner of using his power. The scene plays out lovely, so much so in fact that my sister (a total neophyte) was completely moved. So, I know a very good movie (if not the great X-Men movie I'm still waiting for) is in there/out there. But this is not it. I admire Matthew Vaughn for bringing this troubled ship in on time, on budget, and passably, as there really is no time to get into the troubled history of this script which was rumored to have never been completed. That's the industry geek in me, which now is tied to the film geek and the comic book geek. For a franchise that I care more about than perhaps I should, this is a very strong step in the right direction. For a stand alone piece of work...well, I think I covered that a thesis ago.

(also, Beast looks horrible. I'm gonna say it just can't be done. Nicholas Hoult is very charming, but ye gods between him and Kelsey Grammer, just call it a day with this character until you can CGI him.)

[anonymous1980]

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS
Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne, Nicholas Hoult, Oliver Platt, Jason Flemyng, January Jones, Lucas Till, Alex Gonzalez, Caleb Landry Jones, Edi Gathebi, Zoe Kravitz.
Dir: Matthew Vaughn.

This reboot/prequel completely cleansed my distaste for the X-Men franchise byX3: The Last Stand (I didn't bother to see Wolverine, thank God). I wasn't really looking forward to this even with the news of an admittedly great cast so this film was a very pleasant surprise. It's the best X-Men film since X2 and possibly my favorite X-Men film so far. The great ensemble of actors give great performances especially McAvoy, Bacon and Fassbender. Extra points for the clever cameos.

Oscar Prospects: Visual Effects, Makeup, Sound Mixing and Sound Editing.

Grade: B+

PAUL
Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Jason Bateman, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Joe Lo Truglio, Sigourney Weaver, Blythe Danner, David Koechner, Jesse Plemons, John Carroll Lynch, Jane Lynch, Jeffrey Tambor.
Dir: Greg Mottola.

There are some funny stuff and clever references and gags in this sci-fi comedy from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost but it unfortunately falls short of the brilliance that was Shaun of the Dead. The film is quite uneven and deeply flawed. Pegg and Frost still make a good comedy team so it's still quite entertaining but Greg Mottola is no Edgar Wright. (And I liked Superbad).

Oscar Prospects: Visual Effects is a possibility.

Grade: C+

Grade: C+

[anonymous1980]

KUNG FU PANDA 2
Cast: Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Gary Oldman, Seth Rogen, David Cross, Lucy Liu, Jackie Chan, James Hong, Michelle Yeoh, Danny McBride, Victor Garber, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dennis Haysbert (voices).
Dir: Jennifer Yuh.

This is actually a terrific film and I even like it better than the original, personally. This film builds on the strengths of what made the original successful and turned it into a funnier and even more dramatically compelling film. The visuals and action sequences are absolutely dazzling. Gary Oldman, as an evil peacock, is one of the best villainous creations of recent memory. He's a worthy adversary and really fun to watch. This is definitely a top-tier Dreamworks animated feature and the second best animated film of the year so far (behind Rango).

Oscar Prospects: Strong contender for Animated Feature and Original Score. Should also contend for Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Sound Mxing and Sound Editing.

Grade: B+