I recently watched Thor and Fast Five on Bluray in the last week or two and thoroughly enjoyed both of them. It seems all of the Marvel tie-ins for the Avengers are pretty good with the best one being the first Iron Man. Both versions of The Hulk would the exceptions since they both sucked - I will say Ed Norton was a better Dr. Banner than Eric Bana. Ok, back to Thor. Holy crap! Chris Hemsworth really bulked up for Thor compared to the skinny George Kirk he played in Star Trek in 2009. I know I started off this review stating that I thoroghly enjoyed this movie but it was at times a bit slow. The way the movie was written could have been better served if the writers had not decided to have events in Thor's realm occur in parallel to events in Earth's realm and then flip back and forth between the two until they merged. If you haven't seen the movie, this might sound confusing but I don't want to spoil the movie for anyone interested in watching the movie. I think they could have had a whole another movie made as a prequel to do more justice to Thor's origin as well. They could have also went the route of the original Iron Man and told the origin of Thor and had it end with him arriving on Earth. Hemsworth was cast perfectly for Thor and Stellan Skarsgard and Anthony Hopkins were very good as well. Natalie Portman...well, I'm not a fan except for The Professional which was her first movie. I would give Thor 3.5 stars out of 5 but it definitely had potential for a better movie. The special effects were very good although there was one scene that looked photoshopped when we paused (every movie we watch as a family has at least 4 interruptions).
I saw Fast Five in the theater and again on Bluray. I'm a sucker for this franchise...and I don't care what you say to me about it. I'm really glad that the Rock was added to this movie because he makes a really good adversary for Vin Diesel. The car sequences are always amazing and I'm surprised how they are able to come up with new ways to showcase some incredible stunts. The Fast series is starting to become like a soap opera though because they found a way to bring back Michelle Rodriguez. For those of you who don't follow this series, her character was killed off in Fast and Furious (the 4th movie). There is also a cameo by Eva Mendez who was in Fast 2. Tyrese Gibson also took time out between Transformers movies to return to this series as well. My favorite returning character is Han, played by Sun Kang, who first appeared in Tokyo Drift (3rd movie). This movie, and series for that matter, throw away any thoughts of an good storyline. This is purely for action, eye candy, and a good chuckle in between the "ooohs", the "ahhs", and the "getouttaherres".
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E and I watch Hanna today and what a fantastic fail of a movie! The movie had potential to be really great and interesting but the plot development was terrible and the ending was abrupt and left me scratching my head wondering why I bothered to watch the movie at all. The lead is played by Saoirse Ronan who also appeared in the movies Atonement and The Lovely Bones. Her character is supposed to be a teenage girl being trained by her father (Eric Bana) as an assassin for an unknown agenda. Her father is rogue CIA operative living off of the grid somewhere out in the wild where there is a lot of snow in a cabin with no electricity or internet access. When he feels that Hanna is "ready", he offers her a way to start her quest by way of an electronic beacon to notify the powers that be that he is back on the grid. This is when we find out that Cate Blanchett wants to kill Hanna and her father but we have no idea why. When it's all said and done, I still don't know why she wanted them dead. I will say some of the fight sequences with Saorise are choreographed very well but the fight sequences can't save this film from a poor script. The acting in this movie isn't all that bad from all of the players but again it was just not good enough to overcome the lousy writing.
The 50th Anniversary edition of West Side Story was just released on Blu-ray last week. It is one of my all-time favorite musicals along with Les Miserables. Since Glee recently paid homage to WSS, E. and I have been wanting to see the movie again so I went and bought it - again. Since it was on sale at Target, I didn't feel all that bad about buying the Blu-ray version since it is such a great movie. The HD transfer of the film is very good even though you can tell it's an older film. I don't know what the state of the original master film is in but Natalie Wood and Rita Moreno are as beautiful as ever. They also remixed the original soundtrack into 7.1 HD Surround but I only have 5.1 DTS/DD Surround which still sounded great. Let's face it, this movie is triple-threat for a musical: it has a great soundtrack, excellent cinematography and awesome choreography. I took time out of my busy schedule this past week to watch it with the family before going to work the other day. I fell in love with the movie all over again watching some of my favorite sequences like the Jet Song, Something's Coming, Tonight, I Feel Pretty, and America. My youngest sat still for the entire movie and seemed to really enjoy the movie.
I am hoping to catch up on some more blu-ray movies in the coming weeks. Once I watch the following movies, I plan on writing some reviews: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Captain America, Cars 2, and Fast Five. In case you haven't noticed, all of my movie reviews include a link to the movies Yahoo! movie info page. I was debating whether or not to link to other sites such as imdb.com, comingsoon.net, amazon.com, or the official movie website where applicable. Please comment and let me know where you would like the links to go and I will consider changing them. Thanks!
I know I previously posted that I would review Transformers: Dark of the Moon so I will write a quick blurb. Suffice it to say, I was disapoointed with it and don't want to waste any more time on the movie then I already have. If you haven't seen it, you're not missing much. If you are a die-hard Transformers fan, then you will probably like the movie more then I did. I just thought the plot was dumb, the replacement girlfriend was more annoying than the previous one (imagine that), and the human characters are even less believable than the previous movies.
I finally got around to watching POTC:ST and again was disappointed. I really liked the first two POTC movies but I didn't like the third one. Stranger Tides was not as bad as At World's End but it did not live up to my expectations. The plot revolves around the different parties trying to get to the Fountain of Youth for different reasons. Hmmm...Where I have heard this one before? Okay, the plot is unoriginal and they didn't try to reinvent it or add any twists. Fine, moving right along...the special effects are...well it's Jerry Bruckheimer, do I need to say anything else about them?
Johnny Depp was his usual Jack Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush is always great as Barbosa. Penelope Cruz was meh. Ian McShane as Blackbeard really shined but his part was a little too small and I would have liked if he had more screen time. That's one of the problems when you have too many main characters in a movie. I mean as big as Cruz was promoted in the movie, she didn't have much screen time and really I would have rather her character had been written out of the movie and just focused on Sparrow, Barbosa and Blackbeard.
I recently watched X-Men: First Class on blu-ray and thought the movie was pretty good on the whole but there is one mistake that is just bugging me about the movie. If you haven't seen it yet and you don't want the movie spoiled you should stop reading here.
Okay, my problem with the movie is that the timeline is inconsistent with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Forget about who's powers got changed and all that but if you saw Wolverine, it ends at Three Mile Island and Silverfox points out that her younger teenage sister Emma Frost is on the island near the end of the movie. Now in First Class, Emma Frost is a grown ass woman and the storyline takes place in 1962 during the Bay of Pigs incident. Oh, by the way, Three Mile Island came online in 1974 and the meltdown occurred in 1979. You would think that the people making these movies would check their timelines within their movie franchises. Come on Stan Lee, aren't you overseeing these movies to make sure they're made properly or are you just collecting the fat checks and calling it a day?
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