Time gets away from us all sometimes. Looking at the date of my last post, I noticed that it has been more than a month since I shared my thoughts with the world. ("The World...ha ha ha, so grandiose in my middle age.)
Here are some of the things I've been meaning to talk about over that time condensed down into bite-sized pieces for your perusal. After all, your Internet time is valuable.
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INCEPTION
I won't do a full review here, but I can tell you that I've seen this movie twice now and it is even more engrossing and impressive the second time around than it was on first viewing.
Writer-director Christopher Nolan reportedly spent over ten years working on this mind-bender of a story about a shadowy team of people who can invade people's dreams to steal secrets--or in the case of Inception, implant an idea. Leonardo DiCaprio is in peak, movie star form as "Cobb", the leader of the team which also includes the cautiously debonair "Arthur" (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, who just gets better and better), newbie Ellen Page and a silver-tongued forger played with impish glee by Tom Hardy. Ken Watanabe plays Saito, the billionaire businessman who masterminds the mission and who provides a very special motivation for Cobb to take this quintessential "one last job."
What the movie is best at is setting up a plausible dream reality with it's own rules and it's own unique stakes while combining that with an emotional backstory almost guaranteed to tug at anyone's heartstrings. Look for Marion Cotillard as Cobb's ex-wife--she's sexy, smart and creepy all at the same time. The idea the crew is trying to implant is almost a Hitchcockian MacGuffin--it seems there could be much easier ways to achieve the same result, but how much fun would that be, right?
So far, Inception is the best movie of 2010--by a wide margin.
THE OTHER GUYS
Another brief review...another winning movie. This is not a groundbreaking comedy by any means, nor does it have the cheeky, parodic lunacy of the first two Naked Gun movies which are clear antecedents for this buddy cop farce. But instead of me blathering on about what the movie isn't, let me tell you what it is: fucking funny.
Will Ferrell is back in form as the dweeby, paunchy, forenzic accountant whose main job with the NYPD seems to be doing the paperwork for the Alpha male, bad ass, supercops played hilariously (and not spoiling anything here, briefly) by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who essentially are doing amped-up, dumbed down versions of their stereotypical movie roles. Mark Wahlberg is Ferrell's unwilling partner, shackled to him after an unfortunate incident involving a New York Yankee just moments before a deciding World Series Game 7. Michael Keaton plays the precinct captain, channeling every precinct captain you've ever seen in a cop movie or TV show over the years and winking at the role just enough to let you know he's in on the joke.
The plot is mostly irrelevant, which is good because its unnecessarily convoluted. The point is the chemistry between Wahlberg and Ferrell, who seem to be having a blast; combined with more than a few good jokes about what it is to be macho and how to find happiness in a workplace full of buffoons. Oh, and Eva Mendes shows up playing Ferrell's "Perfect Wife" who, in a running gag that wisely stops just before it gets too old, Ferrell can't stand and Wahlberg naturally lusts after.
You're not going to believe this, but if you stick around through the final credits, you might actually learn something about Ponzi schemes and the ridiculous inequity in the distribution of wealth in present-day American society, so you can't say the movie isn't enlightening in it's own way. My grade for The Other Guys would definitely be a B+ and this year, that's pretty damn good.
BP Stops the Leak...Can't Congratulate Itself Fast Enough
Am I the only person still concerned that there are literally millions of gallons of crude oil still floating around in the Gulf of Mexico, leak or no leak? I think the mainstream media will revisit this story when the prices of shrimp and other fish or crustaceans normally harvested in the Gulf suddenly skyrockets.
Still, it is a relief that for now the leak seems to have been capped. I only wish that greedy BP had put enough money and manpower into preventing such a spill in the first place. With their history, they should never have been allowed to build a deepwater rig in the Gulf of Mexico in the first place.
Summer TV Worth Watching
Quickly, thumbs up--oh wait, that's trademarked. Thanks Roger Ebert! :-(
Let me try again...here are the shows worth watching or DVR'ing this summer:
Mad Men
Friday Night Lights (if you didn't catch it on DirectTV)
Top Chef
Royal Pains
Covert Affairs (will make you remember Alias fondly though it's not nearly as complex as that show was)
The "C" Word
Lie to Me
This category is "Shows Worth A Look or Two, But Don't Get Hooked":
Next Food Network Star
The Closer
Louie
The Good Guys
And finally, "Shows That If You Watch More Than Once, You Clearly Are Wasting Your Summer and You Should Consider Destroying Your TV As Punishment":
The Bachelorette
Bachelor Pad
Dating in the Dark
Rizzoli & Isles
Wipeout
It's getting late...but at least I have a three-day weekend! Hooray for me. Bad for you, if you don't. Come back and visit me soon, I promise I'll write more. Maybe I was away at summer camp?
Peace.
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