"Cowboys & Aliens:" slightly more good than bad

07/29/2011

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Cowboys & Aliens
In a summer where the blockbusters have been wildly varied--I'm talking about a scale from Pirates of the Caribbean to Super 8--Cowboys & Aliens is slightly on the higher end...but not by much. 

The Jon Favreau-directed flick isn't anywhere near as good as it should be, especially with the Iron Man director, Steven Spielberg producing, and the addition of both Indiana Jones and James Bond, but it's just not. It's not terrible, mind you, but it's just merely meh. Which is almost as disappointing as a truly awful movie since I actually had fairly high hopes for Cowboys & Aliens. I mean, with the formula I just described above, how could it go wrong?

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“Captain America” salutes adventure classics and the golden age of comics

07/22/2011

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Picture
I love going into a theater with low expectations. In my mind, there was no way Captain America could be anything other than crap. For more than a decade now, our summers have been saturated with superheroes in tight-fitting outfits battling evil and their inner demons. How could a one-dimensional do-gooder like Captain America — an all-American, nauseatingly flawless square-jawed Superman type with generic powers — offer anything I’d want to see? By bucking the trend of comic book films of the last 12 years.

Things have gotten gray. Our bad guys are complex and forged by understandable circumstances. We see there is a motivation behind their madness. Our good guys are flawed and driven to wonder if they are any better than the foes they seek to defeat — renegades with no regard for the law on a quest to find what they consider to be justice. Things are not so in the 1940’s world of Captain America.

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Satisfying ending for "Harry Potter" franchise

07/14/2011

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Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows
As someone who started off as a fan of Harry Potter from reading the books many, many years ago, I've had a hard time staying a fan throughout the decade of films. It's difficult to stay steadfast when something you truly enjoyed continually gets worse and worse with each film. It's no secret that I openly hated Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One. It was merely PART of a movie with no real start or finish. So I walked into Part Two with dismal hopes for the culmination of the wizarding franchise. But, color me surprised when I was actually engaged at every turn during Part Two. It was suspenseful and fulfilling with every plot device finally having some actual weight to each circumstance.

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"Horrible Bosses" surprisingly not horrible

07/08/2011

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Horrible Bosses
It's safe to say that I had extremely low expectations of Horrible Bosses going into the theater. All three of the lead actors in the film, Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day, have been in some horrible films in recent years despite being fairly likable actors. Bateman was in the god-awful The Switch, Sudeikis had the whole Hall Pass incident, and Day was the second banana is a Drew Barrymore rom-com. So, I feel like I was fairly astute in my low expectations of this buddy comedy about three stressed out dudes wanting to murder their bosses. 

I am actually fairly shocked about how funny this film turned out. Horrible Bosses is not only surprisingly not horrible but actually pretty hilarious. 

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