The Last Days on Mars (2013)

Tags

Drama, Elias Koteas, Horror, Liev Schreiber, Movie, Romola Garai, Science Fiction, The Last Days on Mars

Hold still, there’s a bug on your face!

Ya know, when I saw a brief description of this one, I was hoping for more of a psychological drama.  Maybe they struggle with whether or not they should go back to Earth, knowing they’re infected with an unknown virus, or something like that.

Nope, just another super-violent-killer-monster movie.

People discover living substance on Mars…living substance infects 2 astronauts…they immediately turn into super strong zombie-like creatures…they attack and infect others…etc etc.  Been done before, you might say.  I wonder if this one started with somebody saying, “how about zombies…ON MARS!”

It has a nice look to it, and the mood of the first 20 minutes or so is effectively creepy I suppose, but by the end of it I felt like I had watched a pretty average B-movie about monsters on Mars.  If you stop and think about it (and you probably shouldn’t), not much in the movie really makes any sense.  Plus, none of the characters are developed to any extent at all, so their fates aren’t of any importance to the viewer.  Well, except for the cute girl I guess.  I was hoping she’d make it.

5.5/10

Taking Woodstock (2009)

Tags

Comedy, Demetri Martin, Drama, Emile Hirsch, Eugene Levy, Henry Goodman, Imelda Staunton, Liev Schreiber, Movie, Taking Woodstock

oh, a hippie? I thought you guys said to dress up as a Hobbit...my bad.

R

Demetri Martin, Imelda Staunton, Emile Hirsch, Henry Goodman, Liev Schreiber, Eugene Levy

Elliot: Have you guys been down to see the festival yet?
VW Guy: We’re cool…we’ll get there again.
VW Girl: We got to the top of the hill and looked down at the sea…and the tiny little people on stage…with their waves of tiny electric voices.
VW Guy: Like ants making thunder…man…it was cool.  But you couldn’t really tell who was jamming down there.

Elliot (Martin) is helping out his parents at their little hotel, despite wanting to be back in New York working as an interior designer.  After learning that a neighboring town wouldn’t let a music festival use their land, Elliot contacts them to say that his family has some land they could use.  One thing leads to another, and pretty soon there’s millions of hippies descending on this unsuspecting little town.

I’m not real sure what to think about this movie.  It’s like an inside look at the lead up to Woodstock, but it’s still stuck on the outside once the festival starts.  We don’t see any performers on or off stage, just a few echoes of music in the distance here and there.

Elliot is our doorway into the whole event, but he’s stuck trying to help his parents back at the hotel.  That is, until his dad says he should go see the festival himself.  Even then, he doesn’t quite make it to the stage.  He just gets sidetracked doing acid with some hippies in a VW.

Maybe the point is that it was more about the experience of being there with other people like you, rather than the music.  If so, fine, but it doesn’t make for a very compelling movie.  In fact, I think “plodding” would be the best word to describe it.  A plodding movie.  It seems like it’s slowly building up to the big Woodstock experience at the end, but all we get is that hippie van and some people sliding around in the mud.

Don’t get me wrong, it captures all of that atmosphere very well (I assume…I mean, I wasn’t there or anything), but it just never really leads us anywhere.  It’s almost like watching a documentary that couldn’t afford to buy the rights to use the music played at the festival.  So they were left just showing everything else.

I suppose all of that would have been okay if the characters were more compelling.  Unfortunately, aside from Elliot’s rather intense mother, there isn’t much interesting going on with anybody.  Eugene Levy was good as the farmer who charges a very high price for permission to use his land for the festival, but he’s not on screen very much.

If you want to see a nice looking, glossed over glimpse into the atmosphere surrounding Woodstock, without the magic of the performances, this could be worth a look.  Just don’t expect a compelling story or interesting characters.  But hey, you can definitely expect a lot of naked hippies!

Woodstock was…kinda boring.

10 – 2.1 for not having a particularly compelling story or characters – 1 for being so plodding/slow – .9 for lack of any performance scenes = 6.0

The Omen (2006)

Tags

Drama, Horror, Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber, Movie, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick

little help...?

R

Liev Schreiber, Julia Stiles, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick

Katherine: Robert…
Robert: What is it, babe?
Katherine: Don’t…let him…kill me…

When his child dies at birth, a husband is convinced – in order to keep his wife from being too upset – to take home a different baby that has no family.  As it turns out, this baby is the Anti-Christ.  Oops.

I have not seen the original 1976 version of this, but I have to imagine that it was better than this.  Everybody involved just seems to be on autopilot.  I can’t pinpoint anything in particular that is obviously bad, but there’s also nothing particularly good either.  Plus, there’s not much energy in anything.  Not in the acting, the music, the direction, or anything else.  Damien (Davey-Fitzpatrick) is especially dull.  They didn’t even give him much creepy to say.  I think the actor is just too young to portray any real menace or intelligence beyond his years.  He just comes off as a cute little kid trying to make mean faces.

Stiles and Schreiber are okay, but lifeless, and as usual, nay, ALWAYS, the mother is the one that sees the kid as being evil, while the husband sits by watching her go crazy, offering up helpful phrases like, “you just need some rest, honey” and “he’s just a little boy.”  I’m pretty tired of that stuff in these kinds of movies.

I guess a few scenes manage to be creepy, and a couple of them will make you jump, but there’s no overall build up of dread that would seem appropriate for the subject matter.  And speaking of that subject matter, we see Catholic church officials talking in the beginning about prophecies being fulfilled and how they believe that Armageddon is approaching soon.  They refer to it as their biggest fear, which seemed odd to me because doesn’t Armageddon also signify the second coming of Christ?  I know there’s horrible stuff associated with it also, but wouldn’t they be generally happy instead?

Regardless, none of that would matter if it was effectively scary or ominous, but it’s not.  It’s well made, but it’s boring.  Also, the final shot of the movie is just plain stupid and unnecessary.  Maybe it was the same in the original, but that doesn’t make it ok.

It’s a no-brainer:  Don’t take home strange, motherless babies from the hospital.

10 – 3 for dull acting, directing, etc – – 1.5 for some silly scenes = 5.5

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

Tags

Action, Danny Huston, Drama, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-choo!

PG-13

Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston

Stryker: The warden tells me that your sentence was carried out by a firing squad at ten hundred hours.  How did that go?
Wolverine: It tickled.

Wolverine (Jackman) and his brother, Victor (Schreiber), fight side by side for many many years, but when they’re recruited to a special forces team that kills innocent people indiscriminately, Wolverine won’t be a part of it and leaves.  Years later, Wolverine is working as a lumberjack and is happily involved with a woman, Kayla (Lynn Collins), but the head of the special forces team, William Stryker (Huston) drags him back into his bizarre experiments with mutants.

I thought the overall story arc of this movie wasn’t that bad, but it lost me in the details.  The characters are dull, there are many scenes lifted straight out of a dozen other similar movies, the dialogue is boring and recycled, and some of the special effects seemed sort of sub-par.  It all added up to one big unmemorable experience.

I kind of liked the relative mystery behind the Wolverine story that we got in the X-Men movies.  It was far more interesting to only get glimpses of his troubled past rather than having it spelled out in a bunch of cliched scenes.  How many times have we seen a heart rate monitor go flat line, everybody look disappointed, then suddenly:  beep.  Wow, he made it!  So the hero of the movie didn’t die in the first half hour…what a surprise.

Is it so hard to be original?  Can’t a writer or director look at a scene and realize that it’s standard, boring dialogue and character development that has been done 1,000 times?  Or is that exactly what the studios want?  They actually want yet another scene of the hero walking away from a crashed vehicle as though he’s going to let the survivors stuck inside live, only to light a trail of gasoline that burns up to the vehicle and causes it to explode in the background as the hero walks triumphantly away?  ‘Cause yeah, that’s been done before.

Anyway, the movie is average.  Things blow up, Wolverine slices up people and objects with his adamantium claws, and we see several other X-People with various far more interesting abilities.  Maybe the next origins movie about one of those characters will be more interesting than this one.

William Stryker does not think through his plans very carefully.  In fact, he seems like kind of an idiot.

10 – 4 for boring, unoriginality – .1 for some blah special effects – .3 for dull characters = 5.6