A day at the movies

So it may be a little late to put up my reviews of week old movies, but I didn't have this blog last week. My usual Christmas tradition has been to spend it at the movies. This year there were 4 major releases so I watched them all and wrote about them. Here are my thoughts which I'm pasting over here from my e-mail stream:

The Spirit:
Or Sin City Lite as I like to call it exceeded my expectations in every way. Frank Miller's adaptation of the old comic oozes with style, great hard boiled dialogue, and awesome one liners to boot. The character of The Spirit has many lovers but only one true love, his city and Miller is able to show this love in several ways. His sick sense of humor also come across and punctuates several scenes with over-the-top characters, situations, and utterances from the characters such as the doctor telling the Spirit "keep the mask on, I think it'll be better that way," or Spirit discovering the situation he's in "this place seems dental, and Nazi." But most importantly this movie makes you want to get to know and love Central City just as much as The Spirit does and that is an accomplishment. A-

Valkyrie:
Valkyrie is a movie of waiting. There is a plot to kill Hitler and take over the government and then offer the Allied forces in WWII a truce before it is too late. That's the story you know. The story this is based on is of the final failed attempt on Hitler's life. Cruise plays a commander who believes Hitler is the arch enemy of Germany and gets sent to Africa because of his radical beliefs. There he looses some of his bits and gets a promotion and a medal and is put in touch with some who share his beliefs. You wait for about 2/5ths of the movie before a proper team is assembled. Then you wait for the plan to formulate. Then you wait for that plan to fail and be reset. By the time everything is moving the movie really draws you in and gets your blood pumping, but it is all over too quickly and in a film where you know what the end result will be the movie does not do anything interesting enough to make you want to keep watching. A feeble attempt was made toward the end having to do with the family of Cruise's character, but went nowhere. It was a well made film with good acting, but it's like taking the scenic route to your grandmother's house for the 20th time. After you've done it so many times, there's nothing really left to point at as a reason to do it again. C

Gran Torino:
Clint Eastwood proves you're never too old to be a badass is this "What if Dirty Harry got old and made friends with is Asian neighbors" movie. Eastwood has been a fun actor to watch and this movie is no exception. But that's about the only thing the movie has going for it. Eastwood plays Walter, an old curmudgeon who's wife just died and his neighborhood has experienced white flight leaving him the only white man on the block with Asians taking over. Tao is his neighbor who is a quiet boy and looked down on by just about everyone. His cousin is in a gang and wants him to steal Walter's '72 Gran Turino as his initiation. The relationship between Walter,Tao & Su the neighbor kids seems forced and the actors playing them delivered their lines as if they only took an acting class as an elective while working on a business degree. While the film does keep you guessing as to what will eventually be the fate of Walter, you know exactly what will happen 20 minutes in and if it weren't for Eastwood's acting this would have been a lesser movie and possibly as straight to DVD release - or a TNT channel original. I suppose they would have had to tone down the ethnic jokes if it were though. C+

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button:
A few years ago I remember seeing Big Fish and enjoying it. This movie has several things in common with that picture. We are presented with a woman on her death bed and her daughter (who does in fact look like a female Billy Crudup) by her side. The dying mother asks her daughter to read her a diary from Benjamin in her final moments. And then a lot of nothing happens. There were interesting bits of nothing. It was a love story, and coming of age story, and right of passage, but someone forgot to put a wow factor into the movie. In Big Fish, you are left guessing if the stories were real or not. Here you know what happens happened, but I didn't really care that they were happening. It may have had something to do with the way it was presented as well. If they'd have chopped off the bookends and just let the movie be about the life of Benjamin and removed the dying mother alltogether it would have had more power to it, but because it was a story being told to us by an outside source it lost some of the magic which is a shame because there were several great moments throughout the film. But we weren't allowed to experience the story - only watch it. B-