The Best Movie Critic   +  TIME

What I Saw on my Summer Vacation

Hey everyone, I’m back from my much needed vacation from movie blogging. Thank you all for sticking around for Luke’s recent fantastic reviews. I’m hoping to get back on my regular once or twice per week posting schedule soon. I’m going to kick things off with a round-up of short reviews about movies I’ve watched recently.

Captain America

I was surprised by how much I liked Captain America. This movie delivered for me in a way that the other Marvel movies haven’t. I loved the constant comic book action due in part to Cap beating up henchmen for the better part of two acts. Chris Evans was fantastic and really sold me on the nostalgic aw-shucks fightin’ forties mentality. Joe Johnston did a pretty good job aping the best parts of Frank Capra while mercifully avoiding the maudlin saccharin-ness of Capra. It wasn’t perfect though. There were major issues building tension to the dramatic climax and I thought Bucky’s death was handled a little too lightly.

The Rocketeer

The night before we watched Cap, we watched Johnston’s previous superhero outing, The Rocketeer. The last time I saw this was in the theaters when I was 6. I love the comics that the movie was based on soooooo much. I really really wanted to like this, or to at least be as excited by it as I was when I was a kid. Unfortunately, it’s a total mess. There are a couple of good action scenes, and I liked Timothy Dalton’s Errol Flynn impression, but it’s just too damn boring. I was glad to see Johnston has cultivated a much better sense of pacing since then. This is a movie that needs a remake bad.

Cowboys and Aliens

A solid popcorn movie. There were a lot of things I didn’t like about this – the constant excuses to get Olivia Wilde in another wet-dress shot, the design of the aliens, the amnesia-based plot, and it felt like it was about 20 minutes too long. However, I did like the actors overall. Daniel Craig does a pretty good cowboy considering he’s British. I like Sam Rockwell in everything, and he does a fine job as a classic western supporting character here. But really I was glad to see Harrison Ford in a return to form. I last saw him in Indy 4, which I hated. Here, he has started to embrace his old age, using it to his advantage rather than trying to hide it. My mental image of old Harrison Ford is him fist fighting terrorists in Air Force One and thinking about how ridiculously awful that concept is. I hope Cowboys and Aliens leads to him taking more of these elder statesman type roles. This is a decent enough way to get out of the heat for a couple of hours.

Speed

So I finally saw Speed, it’s OK. I really think the whole 3rd act could have been cut out. Everything after the bus exploding was unnecessary. I put this on my Netflix Instant queue after re-reading what Grant Morrison wrote about it in his comic, The Invisibles. To paraphrase – Speed is about evolution. On the bus, every nationality of people is represented. The bus driver looks like Cro Magnom Man and he’s driving everyone towards disaster. After the tantric love scene on the subway, they burst up onto street level below a theater playing 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is about evolution. – That theory is better than the movie was. But the bus driver really does look spectacularly like a cave man.

Kansas City Bomber

On paper, this looked like a homerun. Racquel Welch stars as a 1970’s roller derby queen dealing with an exploitative boss played by R. J. Fletcher from UHF. In actuality though, this was extremely boring. It would make an awesome sado-masochistic double feature with the original Rollerball. They’re bad in the same way. You could even make some sort of continuity between the two where James Caan is Racquel Welch’s son in the future.

Black Death

So I’m in Game of Thrones withdrawal and saw this on Netflix, a period piece about knights and witches starring Sean “Lord Stark” Bean, count me in! However, rather than the DTV gore-fest I hoped it would be, I got a pretentious art-house knight story that played like Wicker Man plus The Seventh Seal – but not nearly as good as that makes it sound. It was OK but slow moving and over long. It reminded me of the recent Valhalla Rising, but much better than that. On that note, Valhalla Rising? More like Valhalla Sucking. Seriously, how do you fuck up a movie about a crazy pagan Viking killing a bunch of pompous knights from the crusades?!?

Kansas City Confidential

A solid but largely unremarkable noir. This would be a good introduction to the genre for someone, but after you’ve seen as many of these as I have, this was just a little too predictable. The bank heist in the movie had some interesting elements, and don’t get me wrong, this is definitely worth watching. It may just be a little overrated.

Sugar Hill

A blaxploitation revenge movie with voodoo. This was pretty good, but nowhere near as mad as it should have been. This seemed like a pretty obvious cash-in on Live and Let Die, which was of course a big cash-in on blaxploitation movies in general, so I guess that makes Sugar Hill two or three times removed. There are some seriously awesome and fun moments in this movie, I just couldn’t help but be a little let down when it wasn’t able to live up to its awesome premise.

The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg

A really pleasant little documentary about the first openly (and proudly) Jewish major league baseball player. There are all kinds of interesting anecdotes through this. It wasn’t just that Greenberg was Jewish, he was also an incredible baseball player and an important figure in combating anti-Semitism. This is worth watching even if you’re not a Jew or a baseball nerd.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

A very pastoral documentary about the Japanese peoples’ fondness for bugs. There’s not really a strong narrative voice in this movie, or an editorial point. It’s just a bunch of bizarre but endearing vignettes about something Americans (by and large) have no appreciation for.

That’s all for now, expect some increased activity here at TMA soon as well as some announcements.