The Muppets

The plot: A puppet named Walter lives with his brother Gary (Jason Segel) in a place called Smalltown. They have both been fans of the Muppets since they were young and when Gary and his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) plan to go to Los Angeles for their anniversary, they realize it is a great time to go see Muppet Theater. Once they get there though, things aren't looking too good as they realize that the only way the Muppets can get Muppet Theater back is if they all put on a big show to raise $10 million before Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) can destroy the theater for good.

The good: There's so many good things about The Muppets. One of the first I will mention is the music. I think it's safe to say you will easily leave this movie with at least one song stuck in your head until death. My personal favorites were "Life's a happy song", "Party of one", and a grand finale song of "Mahna Mahna" performed by the entire cast. The music is so catchy and fun, even the biggest anti-Muppet moviegoer will find it hard to resist the charm of the score.

Another surprising thing about The Muppets is the amount of wit and humor throughout, The Muppets is actually quite hillarious. There's a lot of sight gags with the Muppets that will keep the kids (and even adults) entertained but there's a lot of tongue in cheek humor that is quite refreshing to see in a children's movie. Characters will mention songs right after they're done singing them, they will cue for a "manical laughter", stop their conversations to let the audience know that was an important plot point and even mention the budget of the movie. There's a particularly humorous scene when Kermit is mentioning how he doesn't think the Muppets will get back together, leading one character to exclaim, "Well I guess this is gonna be a short movie". Witty stuff.

Jason Segel and Amy Adams were the perfect choices for the leads as well, I couldn't picture anyone else replacing either of them. What, with Jason Segel's love of singing and very adolescent-like nature and Amy Adams' ability to play the happiest mofo you will ever meet (see Enchanted for further proof if you don't believe me...this chick is happy). A lot of celebrities make cameos at the end which is pretty stellar to see as well. They actually put Jack Black in a role that I liked him in.....color me shocked. :O

The bad: As much as I love being a Debbie Downer...I actually can't think of a noticeable negative to say about this movie. Wow.

The gist: The Muppets is a delightful, irresistible, adorable movie for moviegoers of all ages. The music is catchy, the performances are wonderful, it does a classic group proud and will easily be welcomed back by any fan of The Muppets. It's just an awesome movie for the whole family to watch, and how many movies these days can say that? Not many. There's your answer. Done.

3/4

Dream House

The plot: Will Atenton (Daniel Craig) moves into a new house with his wife; Libby (Rachel Weisz) and their two children; Dee Dee and Trish. Soon after moving in, their daughters begin to see a strange man lurking around, and after some research, Will finds out that the previous owners will all murdered by someone in their family; Peter Ward. Will begins to think that Peter Ward is back to get his family and the rest of the movie is about his discovery about Peter Ward and who the man lurking around is once and for all.

The good: There's very little redeeming here, so I'm going to have to start grasping at straws.....oh, Naomi Watts (who plays the Atenton's neighbor) and Rachel Weisz perform well here with the bare, minimal material they are given. Seriously...about 20 minutes total of speaking time for the both of them. Way to take the good things and squish them like a family of bugs.

The bad: Oh boy, where the hell do I start? Listing the number of things wrong with this movie is like listing how many rocks are currently residing in the United States. Well, for one...the preview is totally misleading. It makes Dream House look like a scary, entertaining horror movie. The joke is now on you if you believed that shit. Dream House is easily one of the dullest and least chilling horror movies of 2011. Not one scary thing happens and you're more likely to give yourself goosebumps by cleaning underneath your fridge.

Daniel Craig is also a big reason why I feel this movie drowns. He delivers such a bland and monotone performance. His voice never changes and there's never any sense of danger or peril in the way he behaves. Even in later (supposed to have been) emotional scenes where he finds out the true discovery of Peter Ward (which isn't surprising in the least if you have watched the trailers) lack any sort of emotion or passion at all. It's as if we're watching a movie about someone two days after they received a lobotomy.

And the twist? Well, I'll ruin it for the two people on Earth who haven't seen the trailer. HE IS PETER WARD and his family is all dead. Yeah, big surprise. Even if you haven't seen the trailers, the clues to this discovery are about as difficult to find as the clues in an episode of Scooby Doo. Plus, this twist has been done several other times in better movies with better finishes (The Uninvited, Shutter Island, The Others). At one point, someone even looks at "Will" and says, "He's back!". How is that not obvious? After he discovers this, there's another lame twist about who else has insidious intentions, but by that point you don't really give a shit considering the 90 minutes of soap opera disguised as a horror movie that you've been forced into watching.

Logic is another aspect of good filmmaking that takes a flying leap out the window here. If Peter Ward was innocent and they had no proof to lock him up, why was he there in the first place? What made them think he did it if there was no proof? Why didn't anyone else investigate the crime to see if he wasn't guilty? Why would people who were trained to work with crazy people allow someone to make up an entire other life with completely different names? Why did it take him 5 years to get out? Why didn't someone else tell him that he was Peter Ward? Seriously, the people in this movie act like such idiots just to get the plot to barely move from beginning to end.

The lowdown: Dream House is an absolutely terrible movie from start to finish. It's dull and thrilless, the main star is someone with the urgency of a potato, the twist is easy to figure out, and it's been done so many times that the neat twist started many years ago by The Sixth Sense has now been flattened to a pancake thanks to movies that take the formula of a ghost horror movie and flush it down the cinematic toilet. Next time anyone involved in this movie decides to make another horror movie of equal quality...just say the butler did it.

0/4

Just Go with It

You know how movies advertised as romantic comedies generally lead people into thinking there's a sense of romance or even some humor? Well, those people will have the rug pulled out from under them in Just Go with It, a movie that miraculously manages to contain not even 1% of comedy or romance.

Danny (Adam Sandler) is a dickhead who pretends he's in an awful marriage in order to attract other women. His latest conquest; Palmer (Brooklyn Decker) is totally into him...until she finds his ring. In order to trick her into thinking everything is okay, he has his receptionist; Katherine (Jennifer Aniston) pretend to be divorcing him and has her children go along with his stupid story in order to make her think that everything is okay. After the group eventually ends up in Hawaii, Katherine runs into an old frenemy; Devlin (Nicole Kidman), where she tries to convince her that she and Danny are a happy couple.

One of the basic problems with Just Go with It is that it's so ridiculously unfunny at times it's painful to watch. Not one laugh worthy moment in its' entire almost TWO HOUR LENGTH. Literally. Nothing is funny. The script is awful and the things that come out of the main characters' mouths, especially Danny's cousin; Eddie (Nick Swardson) are absolutely absurd that anyone on planet Earth would find this shit funny. Even Jennifer Aniston's charisma is totally flushed down the toilet based on the completely charmless and humorless things she is forced to say.

And seriously, isn't this like Adam Sandler's 10000th movie about some type of amateurish and contrived attempt to avoid commitment? In 50 First Dates, his crush has memory problems. In Click, he uses a remote control for his own selfish purposes while pushing his family and wife away. In I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, he pretends to be gay while falling for someone involved in his lie. In Anger Management, he has tons of anger problems and his therapist screws with him. This formula of juvenile and crass humor topped off with a bit of hokey, gooey, contrived attempts at having a heart just don't work. Adam Sandler plays the exact same character in every movie with similar problems about love, relationships, and commitment following right behind him. The formula is stale and generally lacks any real type of romance or sense of humor.

You can see everything coming in Just Go with It a mile before it shows up. The awkward contrivances that follow the main characters' snowballed lie, the scene where they both "realize" that while faking a romance, they're actually developing one in the process, the scene where Katherine and her arch rival; Devlin actually bond over sincerities and drop the lies to form a real frendship. It's all here sadly. Not one thing in Just Go with It can't be seen from intelligent (or hell, even comatose) life on other planets. And because of how trite and predictable the whole movie is, the events just don't feel like they have any ounce of a genuine nature to them. At times it feels like a really old sitcom that you're watching about the wacky situations people get into with love matters.

Just Go with It just really struggles to provide anything new or humorous. The formula of finding love in an unexpected place has been done since the cavemen were found on the lawn, except it's been done so much better in so many different movies. The writing is crass, unfunny, and just juvenile and trashy overall. Just Go with It just reaks of a poor attempt to cash in on Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler's fame. There's a running joke about how the name Devlin is equivalent to shit for Katherine's children in this movie. Just Go with Devlin would have been the perfect title for this piece of Devlin.

0/4

P2

The lead should have escaped quicker and that's a mistake the audience will surely not make

1/4



The Ref

Still one of my favorite Christmas movies ever. If this isn't my family in a nutshell then Idk what is. 

4/4

Contagion

That is it. I'm officially losing hope on 2011 for being a great year of movies. Disappointment after disappointment hits theaters every week in this depressing years of movies. Contagion had all the potential in the world to be awesome. But instead, it wastes its great cast and gives moviegoers a tedious, safe, uninspired and unsatisfactory drama that's equivalent to 106 minutes of pure nothingness.

Contagion has a pretty solid premise, or at least, I thought it would have had a pretty solid premise. Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from her Hong Kong trip with a cold (or so she thinks it's a cold). Soon after, she's having seizures, memory problems, and eventually collapses into a condition which leads to her death, leaving behind a devastated, fragile, and very confused husband; Mitch (Matt Damon). Pretty much, the whole movie traces how the disease spreads; dealing with a doctor in Atlanta (Laurence Fishburne), a doctor sent to Minneapolis (Kate Winslet), a blogger in London (Jude Law), and another doctor who traveled to Hong Kong to find out what is the origin of the disease (played by Marion Cotillard). The movie traces how all these people relate to each other in more ways than once. So pretty much, it's Babel or Crash but with sickness. Fun times.

One of the big problems I had with Contagion is the structure. Unlike amazing movies like Crash that are able to connect all these stories and make them interesting & worthy of attention, Contagion just fails at that. You barely know anything about any of these characters so when bad things start happening to them, your reaction is just like....SO? Because of the billions of stories going on, so many actors are wasted as a result. While some are given very little to do (Kate Winslet and Laurence Fishburne), others turn in some of their worst performances yet. Matt Damon is a total stiff as the lead. He rarely acts like a human being throughout the entire movie and is totally devoid of any emotions. A scene later on in the movie where he's viewing his deceased wife's picture is supposed to be heartbreaking but it just comes off as bad Lifetime. Jude Law is another actor who really really doesn't do well here at all. There's just something so pretentious about the way he delivers his lines. You would think a movie about such intelligent people would present these characters as....PEOPLE. I've seen cartoons with more life-like qualities than these characters. Oh, and they totally waste Marion Cotillard as well. Her scenes were probably some of my favorites so of course they have to cut them short. Good times.

For a movie about such a deadly disease, Contagion is rather dull as well. Nothing exciting (minus the early scenes with Gwyneth Paltrow) really happens at all. Where's the tension? Where's the excitement? They barely touch on that, instead we get nonstop, neverending discussions about the disease. How did this movie even get labeled as a Drama without any drama? 95% of the time it reads as an insufferably awful documentary on some channel about learning. Da fuck? I've seen zombie & end of the world movies that present more situations about what people do in the face of disease than this one. The plot is just so dull and flimsy, I don't really get how the director thought he could stretch this like putty into a feature length movie.

And when watching the preview for Contagion, do you feel like this is the type of movie to present some new, relevant, and suspenseful information about the effects of disease? Yeah, well I was suckered too. Contagion tries to be intelligent, but as someone once said, "An empty barrel makes the most noise". There's absolutely no point to Contagion except for that disease can spread quickly from person to person. And the only people that is news to are those who lick the driveway for dessert. For everyone else....NAHT groundbreaking news. There's nothing informative or new about Contagion. There's not even a twist. Information which Matt Damon finds out about his wife after she dies COULD HAVE BEEN A TWIST. BUT THEY DON'T TWIST IT! NO TWIST! I'm pissed. Granted, any type of twist that was attempted at this point would have probably failed, at least it would have proved for being an entertaining failure instead of the tedious sludge that the moviegoer has to tread through. And just when you're about to get out of the sludge, Contagion actually has the nerve to throw on 90 more pounds of mold and toxic garbage. The ending is an absolute cop-out. A confusing ending only due to the amount of nothingness that was present.

Contagion is a cliched, tedious, disaster of a movie that had potential to be everything but what it turns into. A great cast. An accomplished director. A premise that had the potential to be interesting. But it sells all those things to the devil, resulting in a movie that lacks tension, originality, story, or even a reason to care. You know a movie is sinking like the Titanic when you watch a character on screen get her head cut open and think.......boy, she's a lucky girl.

1/4

Friday the 13th

I'm probably going to movie review hell for saying this but IDGAF....Friday the 13th was actually a pretty good remake. Sure it's nothing but Jason killing horny, drunken, druggie teenagers for 90 minutes, but it's not like the original was anything different so I won't knock this version down for dumbing down the original.

In this Friday the 13th, we actually get to watch Jason plow through two groups of teenager. In the first 30 minutes, Jason demolishes a group of teens (my favorite death was the one with the sleeping bag), and saves one of them named Whitney (Amanda Righetti), because of her strong resemblance to his mother. He keeps her as his pet in his dungeon/home? type of deal. Soon after, her brother Clay (Jared Padalecki) runs into a new group of teens while looking for Whitney. As expected, it's not long before this group is meeting their end at any sharp object within Jason's grasp.

People don't go to Friday the 13th for an intriguing plot, Oscar-worthy performances, or a grand twist they didn't see coming. They go to see tits, blood, and the occasional good one-liner thrown in between each kill. And overall, I would say that this one delivers each of those. There's tons of nudity and sex (Julliana Guill gets a large opportunity to show off her well...largeness). Willa Ford also gets a nice chance to show off her assets as well, despite being in the movie for as long as her singing career lasted. A lot of the kills are pretty neat as well. The death scenes involving a sleeping bag, a bow and arrow, and a machete through the head were easily the best. Hell, there's even a death at the end that I didn't really see coming. As for humor, I would say it has some of that as well, thanks mainly to the token stoner and black guy.

As for the negatives...my main one is that everything has the the tendency to be too dark and/or fast. Michael Bay and Marcus Nispel (who created the very music video-ish Texas Chainsaw Massacre) have the tendency to film everything like you're in a windtunnel. Tons of shit is flying in front of your face but you couldn't be any more clueless as to what's going on. Another is in the structure of the film. I much preferred the first group of people that dies in the first half hour to the second group that takes up the rest of the movie. It just seems a bit pointless and tedious to me to kill a whole group of teens after setting them up for it....only to do the exact same thing over again. Repetition in a 90 minute movie isn't cute.

Overall, Friday the 13th gets the job done. Skin is shown, skin is impaled, things are smoked, liquids are consumed, and brain cells are on vacation. Which is exactly what's expected when watching a movie like Friday the 13th. Let's just hope that this one is the last Jason remake and no one comes up with the bright idea of Saturday the 14th for a sequel.

3/4