I never miss a surf movie.
"Chasing Mavericks" is the latest one. It's about teen Jay Moriarty of Santa Cruz.
The film is quite similar to "The Karate Kid," with some "Big Wednesday" and "Soul Surfer" thrown in. An older, more experienced surfer, Frosty, helps Jay surf the big waves at Mavericks near Half Moon Bay.
The reason I have compared it to "Soul Surfer" is how clean the movie is. It's an incredibly mild PG, no cursing at all, no nudity, no sex, no violent. I think the only reason it got this rating is because of the ending.
As for the movie itself, it's a little slow-moving. The only cast member I recognized was Elisabeth Shue.
I was surprised that, being here in Ohio, not to mention how little advertising there was, that there were about 25 or 30 people in the theater for the 7 p.m. showing. I hope the film does well!
"The Paperboy" is a disgusting movie that should have been rated NC-17 instead of just R. I only went to see it because John Cusack was in it.
It takes place in 1969, and the plot is about two reporters (Matthew McConaughy and Zac Efron) investigating whether or not John Cusack's character was actually guilty of murder. The film is kinky and violent.
It was reminiscent at times of "In the Heat of the Night" (the movie, not the TV series), and the scenes with the African-American women borrowed quite a bit from "The Help."
P.S. The really strange thing is that both this movie (which I saw on Sunday) and "Chasing Mavericks" (which I saw on Saturday) had pivotal scenes which involved the young man being able to hold his breath under water for several minutes.
"Pitch Perfect" is one of 2012's sleeper movies. It's been doing steady business without a great amount of publicity and has gotten good reviews.
But why, I don't know. I saw it yesterday and thought it was one of the strangest movies I'd ever seen. I actually considered walking out of it.
It's the story about the a capella competitions by various college singing groups. The premise is that there is rivalry not only among different schools, but also with the other groups in the same college.
These various college groups have imprompto singing competitions in dark alleys, with a singer in one group starting a random tune with the others then chiming in. The women's group one year was all beauty queens, but the next year it was a variety of shapes, sizes and colors of girls. The movie went from "West Side Story" to "The House Bunny" and back again. It was more "Revenge of the Nerds" than it was of "Glee." There's also a subplot involving the movie "The Breakfast Club."
Although Paranorman is a computer-animated film, it is not meant for small children. It's too creepy.
Borrowing an idea from The Sixth Sense, Norman can see dead people, although no one believes him. He must stop seven judges and a witch from 1712 who have risen from the dead from destroying his town.
The scenes are sometimes beautiful, sometimes physically ugly. Be sure to stay throughout the closing credits!
I wish I'd known in advance how violent Cloud Atlas is. Then I would have been prepared for it.
This is the already-notorious three-hour Tom Hanks/Halle Berry science fiction movie that cost more than $100,000,000 to make and is doing very poorly at the box office, at least in the US. I understand that it is doing quite well elsewhere. Cloud is about a number of interconnected stories taking place between the 1850s and the 2250s(?). There will be one scene concerning one story, then the next scene with the next story, then the next story, and so on. Some sequences are only two or three minutes long each. My personal favorite was the one with Halle Berry in 1973, probably because it was the one I could identify with the most.
Others have commented about the length, the confusing plot lines, the special effects, the characters, etc. My main complaint was the one that hasn't gotten any commentary at all--the scenes of people getting their throats cut, a guy killing himself by putting a pistol in his mouth, the beatings.
The second-to-last storyline, which takes place in Seoul, borrows heavily from The Matrix, Logan's Run and the second series of Star Wars movies.
Clint's newest, Trouble with the Curve, is simply a far less violent and more funny variation of his last film, Gran Torino. It also has a happy ending, unlike GT. Eastwood seems to have settled into a typecast of playing grumpy old men who growl at everyone else.
In Curve, he plays an aging professional baseball scout for the Atlanta Braves who is trying to hide that he has macular degeneration. A younger scout, meanwhile, is relying on computers to monitor potential new players for the Braves. A scout for the Boston Red Sox is also watching the players. Of course, it turns out that all three men miss noticing a potential player elsewhere.
You'd think a movie about the making of Psycho wouldn't be funny. But it is. Hitchcock stars Anthony Hopkins as Alfred, Helen Mirren as his wife Alma, with James D'Arcy as Anthony Perkins, Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and Jessica Biel as Vera Miles. The dry insults the characters quietly lob at each other, and the various references to Hitchcock movies can make you laugh out loud.
The film is also meant to be historical. I didn't know that lovely Norman Bates was based on a real man in the 1940s, or that Alma ending up rewriting some of the script, or that Hitchcock tried to buy up all the copies of the book on which the movie is based so people wouldn't read it beforehand.
There was one detail I looked up at the IMDb after I saw the movie. The Bates mansion and motel are well-known attractions at Universal Studios, but the movie states that all the filming was done at Paramount. Even while watching Hitchcock, I suspected that was incorrect, as I knew that most of the director's movies were from Universal.
Last of the Dogmen is a 1995 Western adventure film written and directed by Tab Murphy and starring Tom Berenger and Barbara Hershey. Set in the mountains of northwest Montana near the Idaho and Canadian borders, the film is about a bounty hunter who pursues escaped convicts into a remote region and encounters an unknown band of Dog Soldiers from a tribe of Cheyenne Indians. The film was shot on location in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada.
It's a really good little flick that surprised me.
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