The Thanksgiving Weekend Rundown

This Thanksgiving break I felt like a real, professional movie reviewer. I say that because I have seen four movies in the last seven days and it has been a blast. 2012, what I thought was going to be just an okay movie year is shaping up to be incredible. The last four movies I saw, though not all major Oscar contenders, have all been great movies.Although, I do expect to see a lot of them at the Academy Awards this year. So, instead of writing four lengthy reviews I'm going to do a Thanksgiving break rundown with a small review and a rating of each movie I saw, in the order I saw them. Most of these movies are new to theatres, save Wreck-It-Ralph, so you'll have time to go catch them.

First up the 23rd addition to one of the longest film franchises in history (50 years). That's correct its Daniel Craig returning as James Blonde Bond, in SKYFALL.

I won't lie, I'm a little biased towards the Bond franchise because I've been watching it since I was a small child. I don't know if that makes me judge it easier or harsher, so you let me know. As far as Skyfall is concerned, I loved it. It was one of those action films that didn't rely on action sequences to make it  a good film. I'm convinced that it could be a good film even if you left out every action sequence. Its the first Bond film in the Craig era (Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall) to heavily rely on the acting and the story to keep the movie going. The other two films seemed to be action sequences with story to connect them all, where Skyfall is a story that has acion sequences connected to it. With this one marking the 50th anniversary of cinematic Bond, there were some great homages to the old films, but not so many that its overwhelming. The best part of this movie is the relationships formed between characters. We finally get to see how Bond relates with other people and how they relate to him , its the most realistic Bond movie in that sense. The best performance of the movie was Javier Bardem. He was absolutely phenomenal. Every time he was on screen I was nervous for everyone else, he had such a demanding presence on the screen. He was constantly doing little mannerisms that made his scenes completely unsettling for the viewer, he may be the best Bond villain of all time. Overall Sykfall gets a 8.5/10. I would give it a perfect but it was far from the perfect film and it sometimes relies to heavily on the "Bond" checklist to be a exceptional film.

The second movie I saw this week was The Life of Pi, once again I'm biased since I read the book, but I was definitely going into this movie very critical, some might say overly critical (Transformers fans.)

The Life of Pi has a fairly simple plot, a boy fights for survival on the Pacific ocean while in the company of a Bengal Tiger. This movie was gorgeous. The CGI on the animals was full proof, the way the ocean and the sky would reflect perfectly, the trippy vision thing, that crazy whale scene, they were all so beautiful. I cannot compliment the creators enough they made one of the prettiest films I have ever seen. It was such a visual film I was overwhelmed at some points. The acting was also superb, Irrfan Khan who plays older Pi, the main character, was genius. He was so emotionally involved in his own story that it forced the audience to be emotionally involved. And newcomer Suraj Sharma, who played Pi through out most the film was, incredible. I believed the helplessness in his eyes, anything he did onscreen I understood why her doing that action. Look out for this kid in the coming years. Overall I'll give Life of Pi a 8/10 there were parts of it that lost my attention and also the filmmakers could have handled some situations better, that I can't tell you about because spoilers.

Hold on, we're halfway there. Get ready to hear me gush, because I saw one of the greatest films ever crafted by human beings this week and I'm about to tell you about it.

10/10 I'm just going to say that now. Lincoln was the perfect film, there was not one thing that Steven Spielberg or anyone else could have done to make it better. The cast is the greatest ensemble of actors I have ever seen assembled, headed by the phenomenal Daniel Day-Lewis who is the one of the greatest actors to ever do be a part of film making. Everyone gave a perfect performance, I have no criticism for any of the acting in that movie, it drove the entire film. The best part of the movie is that it didn't rely on any gimmicks or "smoke and mirrors" as my brother would say. It relied on two things and two things only, the story and the people telling it. I'm telling you, they all did such a fantastic job that I was worried about the 13th amendment getting passed. I know full well that slavery is illegal but this movie and those actors did such a great job that I was so enveloped in the story, that things that I knew were going to happen became suspenseful. So, a perfect 10 for Steven Spielberg and I will see you at the Academy Awards sir, on stage, for best picture.

The last movie I saw was no Lincoln, but it was one of the funniest films I have seen this year, Wreck-It-Ralph.

Can I start by saying that I love Disney. I'll just do it, Disney I love you. You will not allow a bad movie to go through your studio, every movie you make you genuinely think that kids and their parents can enjoy your movies, you don't just make good children's films, you make great films. It's always hard to review animated movies because a large chunk of the live-action movie making process is gone. I will say that the voive acting in this was phenomenal. I have never liked John C. Reilly (Ralph) more than I like him here. Sarah Silverman, (Vanellope) Jack McBrayer (Fix-It Felix, Jr.) and Jane Lynch (Calhoun) were all great. The hard part about animation is making me care about a bunch of computer code that is told to make a character move around and move its mouth and Wreck-It Ralph's cast did that, I really cared about all the characters. I was emotionally involved with all of their stories and that's a hard thing to do. The plot was smart, and the jokes were clever, especially for video game fans, like me. I laughed harder at obscure video game jokes than I did anything else, but the non-video game humor was good too, you don't have to be a video game nerd to like it. I'll give it an 8/10.

So that's the film rundown, this has been a phenomenal season for film and things are only looking up. The first part of The Hobbit looks great and one of the only films that looks like it can rival Lincoln at the Oscars in Les Miserables.

Feel free to comment, agree, disagree, what you want to see reviews of. Thank for reading!

Explosions! (A Film by Michael Bay)

Transformers is back and doing what it does best, insulting the audiences intelligence. Once again Michael Bay believes that if he shows enough things being ripped apart and blown up that I'll forget all about the plot hole that all the Primes could fly through at the same time. If you don't know what a plot hole is here's a definition: A plot hole, or plothole, is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story's plot, or constitutes a blatant omission of relevant information regarding the plot.

That definition pretty much sums up the whole Transformers movie franchise save this one. That movie was awesome.

Lets just look at "plot" for a second, this will be brief.

Humans discover an Autobot (good guys) ship on the moon that was carrying a very powerful Cybertronian, Sentinel Prime, and devices called "Columns" that act as a door to time and space. So they open a portal that teleports things. So the Autobots retrieve Sentinel and 5 of the "columns." But it was all a trap and Sentinel betrays the Autobots and joins the Decepticons (bad guys) so they can bring their home planet to earth and force the humans to rebuild it.

So...yeah, there's that. So lets look at some plot holes.

1. Where did the Decpticons get all these "Columns" and where are they keeping them?

So near the beginning of the film it shows Megatron and Starscream battered and bruised from their last battle. They have a small camp and are pretty much stripped down to nothing. Then at the end of the film, the Decepticons have hundreds of the Columns. Wait wait wait. What? You're telling me Megartron had hundreds maybe thousands of these things in that tiny camp? They were the only Decepticons on Earth so they had to have them. But they were never shown or talked about until the end of the film.

2. The government won't let Sam see his car because he doesn't have clearance, but at the end of the movie they are letting a random foreign bodyguard hack government systems?

You read it, I can't even explain it anymore than that.

3. Sentinel Prime declares Chicago secure only to be entered by about 100 humans and 10 robots.

So the bad guys are about to bring their plan all together! Chicago is theirs! Their home planet is almost arrived. "The city is secure!" says Sentinel Prime. Then 100 army troops and 10 giant robots enter the city unnocticed.



The next thing that bothered me is the attempt at humor. While it wasn't super offensive or gross in this film, it was still very distracting. For instance and NASA engineer on the Apollo 11 mission tells Sam about what they found on the Dark Side of the moon. He tries to be like Deep Throat, and pulls 2 guns on a Decepticon and dies a hero. Who do you think played this man? If you guessed that Asian guy from the Hangover, sadly, you are correct. Okay, Michael Bay, reason with me buddy. This man was giving Sam legit advice and doing cool stuff. Why do you have to make 4th grade homosexual jokes the whole time? How do you expect me to take this guy seriously?

The action was actually just mediocre. I was pretty mad when Autobots shot up innocent humans, the people they swore to protect. I was expecting a lot more, because the 2nd one had great action so I thought that this one would have taken a major step up. It was really just OK. The 3D wasn't spectacular. And the 1 major thing that made me the maddest was the Megatron fight. Megatron, the main villain for the whole Transformers franchise was defeated in 30 seconds. 3 strokes of a battle-axe and he was done.

So, overall really crappy movie. Stay away, save your money and if you want to see a good Transformers movie go get the 1986 animated version. I'll give it a 4/10 because I like the Transformers franchise minus the last 2 movies. And I'm happy that this is the last Shia/Michael Bay Transformers film.

"The battle is over, but the galaxy spaning adventures of the Transformers will continue and the greatest Autobot of them all-Optimus Prime-will return." -Transformers:The Movie (1986)