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Top 10 Summer Movies – 2011

For anyone who reads my blog because they enjoy my movie reviews here’s my top ten from this Summer.  Sorry fans of Bridesmaids – I gave it a decent review, but I liked these 10 movies better.  So get out to a theater or re-order your Netflix queue for these:

  1. Rise of the Planet of The Apes – Tea Party’s idea of Evolution, which I assume is why they oppose it
  2. Crazy Stupid Love – Best romantic comedy since 500 Days of Summer
  3. X Men: First Class – washed away the stain from X Men 3 and X Men Origins-Wolverine
  4. Warrior – a thoughtful, emotional movie about MMA, which is presumably why MMA fans did not see it
  5. The Help – lesson I took away: White women are horrible racists, except for the white woman with big breasts
  6. The Trip – I may be biased because I am a comedian, but I loved this road tripping movie about two comics
  7. Captain America – Benefited greatly from not being Thor (which was not terrible) or having Ryan Reynolds in it
  8. Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2 – bye bye Potter.
  9. The Debt (3rd two-word “The” movie on the list) – brought a little high class to the Summer season
  10. Midnight in Paris – I prefer Woody Allen being cynical and depressing, but this fairly positive movie was pleasant

The biggest loser of the Summer – Ryan Reynolds.  Had the worst movie of the Summer, Green Lantern, and received such bad reviews for The Change Up that he actually broke my streak of seeing movies with Jason Bateman.

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Movie Of The Week: Captain America

In an effort to save some money on electricity I contemplated spending the entire day in the movie theater and seeing Captain America, Friends With Benefits, Larry Crowne and Zookeeper.  However I realized what is the use of saving on your electricity bill and carbon footprint if you kill yourself midway through your trip to the movie theater?  So I stuck with Captain America and was entertained throughout.

As I sat down in the theater with my face on fire from the heat I was treated to an array of previews.  Taylor Lautner is in a new movie, sort of looking like a Latin Jason Bourne.  The movie is called Abduction, or Abducted or Abortion (Liam Neeson must have rejected it as part of his Taken-Unknown trilogy of angry men who are clueless but have fighting skills to help them get clues).  It actually looked pretty good, except it had Taylor Lautner.  He just doesn’t appear to have much acting talent, even in the previews.  And it is directed by John Singleton.  How far the mighty have fallen!  Despite starting his career with an Oscar nomination for Boyz N The Hood, he is now relying on spoiled and stupid teenage girls from Team Jacob to bail his career out.

Then there was a preview for The Amazing Spider Man.  I want to reject this film because it is unnecessary.  When The Hulk was rebooted (successfully in my opinion) in 2008, after only 5 years from the first attempt it was acceptable because the Ang Lee Hulk was one of the 20 worst movies of all time.  But Spider Man (at least the first two in 2001 and 2004) were excellent.  There was no need, but Hollywood now treats franchises like NBA jerseys – they keep changing them, whether they work or not, because there is a significant portion of the jersey wearing population that will immediately go get the new one to be in fashion.  I hope the new Spider Man fails on principle, but I’m sure it won’t.

Then I saw a preview for Mission Impossible 4.  I don’t care who hates on Tom Cruise and why they hate on him – the dude is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, movie star of the last 30 years.  The dude is still cool to me.  He does his own stunts, has talent (not Daniel Day Lewis level, but he is also no Paul Walker) and I still feel that, unlike Al Pacino, who will be in this Fall’s Jack and Jill – an Adam Sandler film that I will be dedicating an entire post to next week, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert DeNiro, Tom Cruise, whether he fails or succeeds, does not appear to take film roles with the desperation of a crack addict seeking a paycheck.

But then it was on to Captain America.

This Summer has been up and down with the comic book movies.  X Men First Class is I believe the best movie of the Summer so far (but my money is on Rise of the Planet of the Apes to take the crown August 5th).  Thor was OK (thanks I think to very low expectations I had) and Green Lantern should be the death knell for Ryan Reynolds’ movie career.  He is not funny, looks like a buff, but goofy Dane Cook and his movies suck badly.  Even from the commercials of his next movie, The Change-Up, it looks like Jason Bateman is going to carry Ryan Reynolds like he’s wounded on the battlefield.  But enough with the negatives – Captain America was pretty good and never really had any lulls.

Chris Evans, who will always have a spot in my heart for his portrayal of Jake Wyler in Not Another Teen Movie, plays the lead character who goes from undersized wimp to Major League Baseball player in the Bay Area circa 2003, thanks to a government experiment.  Evans gets lumped in with Reynolds way too much (e.g. Bill Simmons’ recent column on Hollywood stars) as an under-performing, over-exposed young star.  I think he has much more potential than Reynolds and this film should be the showcase for that.  He is very solid in this movie and can clearly carry this franchise (until it gets rebooted in 6 years).

There were several supporting players to admire in this movie.  Hugo Weaving is back from purgatory, probably as karma for his ridiculously good fortune of being in both The Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies, as the villain and Tommy Lee Jones is especially good (at least for this genre that usually either under-writes or under-employs supporting actors of quality).  He manages to deliver mostly comic relief with the same dry, go fu*k yourself delivery that won him an Oscar in The Fugitive.  I honestly think we was the least replaceable member of the cast, even though he is only in about 15% of the movie.

On this hot weekend, Captain America is a good choice for a summer movie.  It never gets too ambitious, but it manages to deliver a solid 2 hour experience.

Final Grade – B+

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Movie of the Week: Green Lantern

In a year with two green superheros, who thought that Seth Rogan and the Green Hornet would receive better reviews that the Green Lantern with Ryan Reynolds?  It is all how you frame the argument.  The big story about the Green Hornet was how Seth Rogan had lost weight for the role.  Even if it is a big piece of sh*t, the stories about that film had a positive/optimistic tone.  Meanwhile, the only pre-production headline I remember about the Green Lantern was that Ryan Reynolds beat out Justin Timberlake, among some other metrosexual B list talent for the lead role.  Ominous…

I had been so optimistic when I saw The Dark Knight, that Christopher Nolan had raised the bar so high on comic book movies that writers and studios would at least raise their game because of raised expectations.  Instead, the studios seem to have said, “Well, sh*t!!! We can’t beat that one so let’s just aim for somewhere between Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Daredevil.”

And from those murky waters emerges the Green Lantern, a barely entertaining movie that makes the digitally overdosed Thor, released earlier this season, look like it was filmed before the invention of the computer.   The plot involves aliens and other planets (which, like Thor, I think automatically renders your comic book second or third tier and not really worthy of a movie adaptation).  It is as if someone asked, “What if we made a 2009-2011 Nicholas Cage movie, but got Dane Cook, or the closest thing Hollywood has to Dane Cook, to star in the lead role.”  It is that mediocre.  And I will never understand why Reynolds, who is buff in this movie, was actually at his most buff when he played a married father in the re-make of The Amityville Horror.  You’d think a superhero in 2011 would be more swollen than a Dad in the 1970s.

The movie basically is a cosmic battle between the good force of will (green guys) versus the bad force of fear (yellow and black stuff – sort of like the intergalactic Pittsburgh Steelers I suppose), which apparently turns Peter Sarsgaard’s character into Eric Stoltz from Mask when exposed to it. Blake Lively plays a fighter pilot with the believability that Denise Richards once played a nuclear scientist in a James Bond film.  Green Lantern must overcome fear issues that stem from his father’s death and his inability to commit to a chick that has managed to turn Leonardo DiCaprio back to monogamy.  You know, problems that affect us all.  There is the plot.  I am sure you can guess how it turns out.

My favorite moment of the Green Lantern experience was, obviously its conclusion when, upon leaving the theater, a member of the theater staff said “Thank you for coming to AMC have a nice day!”  A man standing behind me said to the staff member, “How you gonna waste my time with that sh*t!”  Now he is a moron twice because a) she did not make the movie and b) how could you not know that it would suck?  But as the old saying goes, “Even a rude, unemployed guy with good expectations for a Ryan Reynolds movie is right twice a day.”

Grade: C-