MOVIE REVIEW: IRON MAN 3

Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) wrestles with inner demons while contending with monsters of his own creation in this sequel from writer\director Shane Black. The story in Iron Man 3 picks up shortly after the events of The Avengers. Having previously entered another dimension in order to save New York City, Tony remains deeply haunted by the experience. Tony has only started to appreciate the gravity of his problems when an enigmatic terrorist named the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) hijacks the airwaves and threatens to bring America to its knees with a painful series of "lessons". ~ Rovi

Director: Shane Black

Cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall

Release Date: May 03, 2013

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence throughout, and brief suggestive content

Runtime: 2 hr. 20 min.

Genres: Action/Adventure

Review:

Picking up after the Avengers was going to be a bit of a task, thankfully Iron Man 3 handles it fairly well lead by new director Shane Black. A slightly more focused, albeit kind of silly, plot than the overstuffed 2nd entry breathes life back into the franchise. Black and Robert Downey Jr. have a tangible chemistry together. Black is capable of keeping RDJ from going into cruise control and the script forces him to explore the effects of the events in The Avengers. It’s a solid logical choice, it would have been terribly easy to just breeze past it and keep him feeling invincible. There are still plenty of laughs and tons of massive summer movie level action set pieces that are thrillingly staged such as the attack on Starks home and a mid air multi-person rescue. That being said there are a few blemishes on the film. It’s not as overstuffed as Iron Man 2, which was too busy serving as a sequel to Iron Man and prequel to The Avengers, but it’s still too busy. The villains are a bit too cartoonish with Ben Kingsley going a bit too overboard (with good reason though). Sadly, Guy Pierce’s character never feels like a complete creation, simply functioning as a plot mechanism. Paltrow and Cheadle are given some extra bits of characterization but nothing earth shattering. As the film, wraps the film starts to feel like it’s tying things up in case RDJ decides to retire from the superhero business (this films marks the last film on his contract with Marvel). While a bit of streamlining and trimming would have made this more efficient summer film, it still manages to trill and excite so maybe it’s not time to throw this franchise on the scrap heap just yet.

B

Cindy Prascik’s Review of Pain & Gain

Dearest Blog, hot on the heels of a great concert, the movies seemed like a poor substitute for the thing I really love. Still, it's Saturday, so off to the cinema I went to see Pain & Gain.

Three muscle-bound meatheads hatch a risky plot to relieve a Miami mogul of his considerable wealth.
Spoiler level here will be mild.

There's really no reason Pain & Gain should be a funny story. Three idiots ruin their own lives and several others, just because they think life owes them more than they've got. However, the sheer stupidity of our terrible trio--brilliantly played by Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Mackie, and Dwayne Johnson--makes this the funniest movie I've seen in at least a year.

I've never held with people who believe dramatic acting is more credible than comedy. Wahlberg, Mackie, and Johnson are absolutely fantastic in Pain & Gain, and Ed Harris nearly steals the show when he turns up to take on the bumbling criminals. It's to both writers' and actors' credit that the leads are enjoyable, yet it's
always clear they're bad guys, and you won't feel sorry for them if things go sideways.

Pain & Gain is loaded with brutal violence, bad language, and drug use, with some boobies thrown in for good measure...pretty much offensive across the board. If you're sensitive about such things, this isn't the movie for you. If, for whatever reason, you can get a laugh out of some horrible and inappropriate scenarios, well...you're in the right place! My only complaint is that the movie's somewhat longer than it needs to be.

Pain & Gain clocks in at 130 minutes and is rated R for "bloody violence, crude sexual content, nudity, language throughout, and drug use." I thoroughly enjoyed it, laughing out loud for most of the two hours. Of a possible nine Weaselys, Pain & Gain gets seven and a half.
Until next


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Time….

Uhhh...get well soon?

MOVIE REVIEW: PAIN & GAIN

Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) is a regular bodybuilder who works at the Sun Gym along with his friend Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie). Sick of living the poor life, Lugo concocts a plan to kidnap Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), a regular at the gym and a rich, spoiled businessman, and extort money from him by means of torture. With the help of recently released criminal Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), the "Sun Gym Gang" successfully gets Kershaw to sign over all his finances. But when Kershaw survives an attempted murder by the gang, he hires private investigator Ed Du Bois (Ed Harris) to catch the criminals after the Miami Police Department fails to do so.

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shalhoub, Ed Harris

Release Date: Apr 26, 2013

Rated R for crude Sexual Content, Bloody Violence, Drug Use, Language Throughout and Nudity

Runtime: 2 hr. 9 min.

Genres: Action/Adventure, Comedy

Review:

I’ve been a bit of a Michael Bay apologist over the years. Not because I believe he’s a mad genius but because I think he’s actually a solid action director whose becoming a whipping boy admittedly due to some of his really bad films. He creates the type of bombastic popcorn movies that are easily digestible and would rot your teeth if you consumed them regularly. Like all indulgences it should be done in moderation which is ironic since Bay doesn’t know anything about moderation. Pain & Gain is a bulging muscle flexing with veins popping out everywhere. Its first act is the type of caffeinated movie going experience that feels like somebody’s poured cocaine into your eyeballs. A bulging Mark Wahlberg is focused and dedicated to his role. He’s clearly enjoying himself throughout and keeps a bug eyed energy alive through the better part of the film. Equally game Dwayne Johnson, looking bigger than I’ve ever seen him, and Anthony Mackie match him throughout. Their interplay is great comedy especially as things get more ridiculous and out of control. Having the story change from point of during the story allows us to get into these morons minds and see what’s leading them down the incredibly slippery slope towards disaster. Tony Shalhoub delivers an extra salty performance in a limited role. Sadly Ed Harris and Rebel Wilson are mostly marginalized in thankless roles. Pain and Gain’s major faults are really a reflection of Bay’s. The characters, all of them, are caricatures of people; none of them feel real in anyway. They’re Bay mutated version of what real people are. Additionally, Bay never knows too much of a good thing. The first 2 acts are crisp and energetic but the last act drags on. It’s not terrible but it could have been streamlined. Bay would have been better served if he remembered its ok not to flex all the time.

B

[Trailer] Thor 2: The Dark World

[Trailer] Thor 2: The Dark World

Iron Man 3 is getting ready to screen in a little under a week and a half and with it Marvel’s Phase 2 of their cinematic universe. The trailer for the 2nd Thor film has been released and it looks like it’ll take the action off world instead of keeping it focused on Earth which I consider a good thing.

Things look grittier and less glossy this time around which could be a good thing. The original Thor was a big question mark for me originally, mainly because I thought it looked silly, but it made me a fan. Here’s to hoping the 2nd film continues to deliver the goods….

Release Date: Nov 08, 2013

Cindy Prascik’s Review of Oblivion

Dearest Blog, yesterday my dear cuz and I headed out to the cinema to check out Tom Cruise's latest flick, Oblivion.

Spoiler level here will be mild.

Future Earth is a wasteland, its few remaining inhabitants charged with safeguarding those resources needed by survivors living off-planet.
Ima be straight with ya, dear Blog, I thought I was gonna love Oblivion. I've been comparing it with Will Smith's upcoming post-Apocalyptic blockbuster, After Earth, and was sure this one would be the winner of the two. Though it's not really a loser, terming Oblivion a winner might be over-reaching.

As you'd expect, Tom Cruise is solid in the lead, Morgan Freeman and my best gal Melissa Leo equally so in lesser roles. Cruise's leading ladies, Olga Kurylenko and Andrea Riseborough, are ho-hum and painfully annoying, respectively. Of the remaining supporting cast, all that's worth mentioning is that Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau looks really good.

Oblivion is smart, but slow, sci-fi, and I'll cop to dozing off at least once. I can give full marks for production design, but the other tech was sometimes so laughably awful I wondered how it slipped into such a high-profile blockbuster. For the most part, I think Oblivion is a pretty well done film, but just not one I found all that enjoyable. Or, to sum it up, as we exited the cinema, my cuz' first words were, "Well...I didn't hate it......."

Oblivion clocks in at an excessive 126 minutes and is rated PG13 for "sci-fi action violence, brief strong language, and some sensuality/nudity." I'm so "meh" about it that I fear it may do to After Earth what Cloud Atlas did to Life of Pi, that is, I won't be able to force myself to see the second, the first left me with such a sour taste.

Of a possible nine Weasleys, Oblivion gets five.

Until next time...





...still more technically advanced than Oblivion...

MOVIE REVIEW: OBLIVION

A solitary drone repairman working on a war-ravaged planet Earth becomes humanity's last hope for survival in this ambitious sci-fi epic from Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes producer Peter Chernin. Olga Kurylenko and Morgan Freeman co-star. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Cast: Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko, Morgan Freeman, Andrea Riseborough, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

Release Date: Apr 19, 2013

Rated PG-13 for nudity, Brief Strong Language, Sci-Fi Action Violence and Some Sensuality

Runtime: 2 hr. 5 min.

Genres: Action/Adventure, Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Review:

You’d be hard pressed to argue that Joseph Kosinski can’t direct a beautiful movie with loads of cool visuals. Both Tron: Legacy and Oblivion are incredibly pretty films but both lack any semblance of emotion or originality. Oblivion takes liberal doses of “inspirations” from a variety of sci-fi classics from the past and even more recent fare. There are moments were the film is nearly in danger of becoming more than the sum of its parts but it just never gets there. There’s plenty to keep you busy and the eye candy on display is occasionally thrilling if terribly familiar. There are plenty of twists and turns in the overly complicated plot. The film would have been better served if the plot were streamlined and avoided some of the more obvious “surprise” turns, some of which are telegraphed as early as the first 10 minutes of the film. Tom Cruise does his usual reliable work but, through no fault of his own, we never feel a connection with his character. Instead it feels like he’s simply driving us through the terrain. Olga Kurylenko, who looks like she’s just had a very sour lemon most of the time and Andrea Riseborough aren’t asked to do much. As a result, the audience is always kept at arms length leaving us thinking about the films that touched on the same subject matter in much better fashion.

C