Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - Movie Review

Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Kurt Russell, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Pom Klementieff, Elizabeth Debicki, Sean Gunn, Ben Browder and Sylvester Stallone.
Written & Directed by James Gunn.

★★★

This movie is faithful to the original formula. It's a fan-pleasing sequel where some of the returning characters get more to do this time around while others don't.

Family is a big theme this time around, to the point that I started to wonder if Vin Diesel was going to pull up in a shiny new car. (Nah, he'll just voice baby Groot.) Quill, Gamora, Drax, Rocket and Groot still fly around the galaxy as paid mercenaries. But Quill runs into who turns out to be his father, a celestial being named Ego (Kurt Russell).

I liked the sisters subplot with Gamora and Nebula, where that relationship/rivalry is fleshed out more. I was amused by the antics of baby Groot. In particular I like how the opening battle was secondary to Groot chasing a space-rat, all to the tune of ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky." I like the addition of Mantis (Pom Klementieff) to the team.

Sylvester Stallone felt like he was wasted, but if what they did with him pays off in a future movie, then it was worth it.

The Place Beyond the Pines - DVD Review

Starring Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta, Dane Dehaan, Emory Cohen, Bruce Greenwood, Mahershala Ali, Harris Yulin, Ben Mendelsohn and Robert Clohessy. Directed by Derek Cianfrance.

★★★

Ryan Gosling's been playing a lot of screwed-up guys lately. It must feed some need inside him. I picture him with a summer cabin with a torture room in the basement.

Here he plays a desperate father who turns to bank robbery to provide for his son.  His path will eventually cross with Bradley Cooper, a cop with a young son of his own.  We see their story for the first two-thirds of the movie, and I enjoyed every aspect of that.

Then it flash-forwards sixteen years to follow the sons, and we see how the choices of the fathers have affected their sons, and here's where the movie went a little sideways for me. It puts together some events that felt too contrived, and it took me out of the movie. There's a real cinema-verite vibe going on with it, and overall I liked it. I just thought the last third weakened the power from the first two acts.

American Hustle - Movie Review

Starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, Louis C.K., Jack Huston, Shea Whigham, Alessandro Nivola and Elisabeth Rohm.
Directed by David O. Russell.

★★★★

The true story would have been meaner and more black and white. I like that Russell took the basic elements and made it a lot more ambiguous and gray.

Russell's now directing three great films in a row - The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and now this. This might be his best yet.

It comes down to the actors, and under a director who clearly gives them a lot of freedom, they all step up. Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane make a great team. If Christian Bale didn't already have an Oscar, he might be getting front-runner chatter for his work here. And Amy Adams hasn't won one yet but I'll be rooting for her.

Bale plays Irving, a con man caught by the FBI, who then work a deal with him to use his con skills to help him catch some bigger frauds. It eventually leads to a web of corruption that may land some US congressmen.

The movie has those gloriously scuzzy details of the 1970's, and Bale's belly and combover are characters in themselves. Every scene crackles. It's lively and vibrant and a lot of fun.

Random Movie Stuff - 4/5/13

- Zoe Saldana (Star Trek) is up for the role of Gamora (on the right) in the big-screen version of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. It's scheduled to open August 1, 2014.  James Gunn (Slither, Super) will direct.  Chris Pratt (Zero Dark Thirty) will play Star-Lord (guy in the middle) and Dave Bautista (The Man with the Iron Fist) will play Drax the Destroyer (the bald guy on the left).  That leaves Groot and Rocket Raccoon yet to be cast.

- Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Lost) has joined the cast of Pompeii. It's directed by Paul WS Anderson (Alien v Predator) and focusses on an enslaved gladiator (Game of Thrones' Kit Harington) fighting back against a tyrant (Kiefer Sutherland) in the final days before the eruption of Mt.Vesuvius.

- We're getting another Godzilla movie coming May 16, 2014. It'll star Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass), Elizabeth Olsen (Silent House), Juliette Binoche (Chocolat), Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai), Bryan Cranston (Argo), Sally Hawkins (Happy Go Lucky) and David Strathairn (Lincoln).

- Bradley Cooper will play the villain in the western Jane Got a Gun, starring Natalie Portman as a woman who turns to her ex-lover (Joel Edgerton) for help when a gang shoots her husband and they're coming to her farm to finish the job while he heals.  Cooper is replacing the recently departed Jude Law.

- Melissa McCarthy and Susan Sarandon will play granddaughter/grandmother on a road trip in Tammy.  Dan Aykroyd, Allison Janney and Mark Duplass co-star.

- Ed Helms will play Rusty Griswold in a Vacation sequel that follows grown-up Rusty having his own rough vacation misadventures. Christina Applegate will play his wife, and Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo are in talks to cameo as Clark & Ellen, grandparents. (Personally I'd like to see past Rusty actors cameo too, including Anthony Michael Hall, Johnny Galecki, and Ethan Embry.)

Hit and Run - DVD Review

Starring Kristen Bell, Dax Shepard, Bradley Cooper, Tom Arnold, Kristen Chenoweth, Joy Bryant, Michael Rosenbaum, Beau Bridges, Ryan Hansen, David Koechner, Jess Rowland, Carly Hatter, Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman. Directed by Dax Shepard & David Palmer.

★★

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard have been a couple for years, so here comes along this home movie that shows off Dax's car collection and features their friends stopping by for roles of various sizes. (I'm actually surprised Johnny Knoxville and Jason Segal didn't cameo.)

Shepard plays Charlie, a man in witness protection who falls in love with Annie (Bell).  Annie has a great job opportunity in L.A., and Charlie agrees to move with her to L.A. and leave witness protection. Ah, but it turns out Annie has a jealous ex-boyfriend who Googles Charlie under his real name and finds the men he testified against.  So we are now in a road movie where one car plans to kill the people in the other car.

Tonally it has this 2 Days in the Valley vibe to it, a date movie with faux-Tarantino flavorings. It's primarily a comedy that is never quite funny. It has a lot of setup for some places where laughs should be, and most of my entertainment came from trying to figure out which cast members know Shepard or Bell from what.

Silver Linings Playbook - Movie Review

Starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Jacki Weaver, Chris Tucker, Julia Stiles, John Ortiz and Shea Whigham.  Directed by David O. Russell.

★★★½

This movie is essentially a well-made romantic comedy.  Quirky characters trying to find happiness.  But it's so well-made, it doesn't feel formula until we get to the finale and then go "Ah." But by then we're really rooting for everyone to succeed.

Cooper gives a career-best performance as Pat, a bipolar man who's just been released to his parents' care after eight months of institutionalization.  He went in for violently beating his wife's lover after catching them in the act.  But "he's better now" and determined to win his wife back.

He winds up becoming friends with Tiffany (Lawrence), sister-in-law of his best friend.  Tiffany has her own issues, having dealt with the death of her husband by sleeping with everyone at her office and getting herself fired.

The bizarre relationship of Pat and Tiffany works because the chemistry between Cooper and Lawrence is electric.  Not only that, but Robert DeNiro as Pat's father gives his best performance in about fifteen years.

It's just a terrific feel-good movie done with more skill than usual.

Weekend Box Office - 9/9/12

1.  The Possession - $9.5 million ($33.35) - 2 wks (LG) -46.4%
 . . . 2834 screens / $3352 per screen
2.  Lawless - $6 ($23.52) - 2 wks (Wein) -40%
 . . . 3138 / $1913
3.  The Words - $5 - 1 wk (CBS)
 . . . 2801 / $1785
4.  The Expendables 2 - $4.75 ($75.42) - 4 wks (LG) -47.4%
 . . . 3260 / $1457
5.  The Bourne Legacy - $4 ($103.7) - 5 wks (U) -44.7%
 . . . 2766 / $1446
6.  ParaNorman - $3.83 ($45.1) - 4 wks (Foc) -41.7%
 . . . 2856 / $1341
7.  The Odd Life of Timothy Green - $3.65 ($43.01) - 4 wks (BV) -42%
 . . . 2717 / $1343
8.  The Campaign - $3.53 ($79.47) - 5 wks (WB) -38.2%
 . . . 2542 / $1389
9.  The Dark Knight Rises - $3.29 ($437.85) - 8 wks (WB) -46.3%
 . . . 1987 / $1653
10. 2016 Obama's America - $3.28 ($26.09) - 9 wks (RM) -41.5%
 . . . 2017 / $1627

Predicatbly slow weekend saw last week's top two keep their spots.  The Words had bad reviews and no buzz, and The Cold Light of Day opened to more screens than planned (1511) but had even worse reviews. The Words and Hit & Run are two Bradley Cooper movies that won't make much but their budgets were low enough that they'll still be profitable.

2016 Obama's America is now the second highest-grossing political documentary of all time.

Random Movie Stuff - 2/12/12

- Whitney Houston (The Bodyguard, Waiting to Exhale) has died at age 48.  Her last movie, Sparkle, is set to open Auguat 10 and co-stars Jordin Sparks, Derek Luke, Mike Epps and Cee-Lo Green.

- Steve Carell and Channing Tatum will star in Foxcatcher, based on the story of John du Pont, a paranoid schizophrenic who killed Olympis wrestler David Schultz.  Bennett Miller (Moneyball) will direct.

- At last, Harry Potter and Dexter unite!  Daniel Radcliffe and Michael C. Hall will star in Kill Your Darlings.  Hall will play a murder victim who inspires the Beat Revolution of 1944.  Radcliffe will play Allen Ginsberg, Ben Foster (Contraband) will play William Burroughs, and Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire) will play Jack Kerouac.  Elizabeth Olsen, Kyra Sedgwick, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Dane Dehaan co-star.

- At one point there were three dueling Snow White movies.  Two of them open this year (Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts and Snow White & the Huntsman with Kristen Stewart) but the third was to take place in 19th-century China and star Natalie Portman.  Now it appears Saoirse Ronan (Hanna) will star in what's now titled The Order of the Seven, about seven Shaolin monks who become outlaws, but they come to the rescue of a British expatriate fleeing an evil woman.

- The plug's been pulled on Alex Proyas's Paradise Lost, based on the John Milton classic.  Legendary Pictures decided they couldn't keep the budget under control.  It was to star Bradley Cooper and Casey Affleck.

Random Movie Stuff - 1/31/12

- Adam Sandler will star in the live-action big-screen treatment of Candy Land, based on the board game. Kevin Lima (Enchanted) will direct.

- Dennis Quaid has joined the cast of The Words, starring Bradley Cooper as a successful author who has to pay the price for stealing someone else's work. Jeremy Irons, Zoe Saldana, Olivia Wilde, Ben Barnes and JK Simmons co-star.

- Clint Eastwood will act again in Trouble with the Curve. He will play an aging baseball scout who's losing his sight, who goes on one last trip to check out a hot prospect. Amy Adams will play his daughter, who joins him on the trip. It will open September 28, opposite Won't Back Down, a drama about two mothers (Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal) trying to make a difference at their local school, and Loopers, a sci-fi time-travel actioner where an assassin (Bruce Willis) runs into the younger version of himself.

- Taylor Lautner is now out of the Stretch Armstrong movie, dropped by Universal, and now Relativity has picked it up and has set aside April 2014 for a release date.

- Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, who'll appear in The Silver Linings Playbook later this year, will reunite for Serena, based on the Ron Rash best-seller about a husband-wife team lording over their new timber empire in 1929 North Carolina. When she finds out she cannot hanve children but he has fathered a son from an affair, she seeks to murder the boy.

- Patrick Wilson is reuniting with his Insidious director James Wan for another ghost story, this one about a haunted farmhouse. Vera Farmiga (Source Code), Ron Livingston (Office Space), and Lili Taylor (The Haunting) will co-star.

- The X-Men: First Class cast has signed back on for a sequel (including James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence), and Matthew Vaughn will return as director.

- Simon Cowell will not bring back host Steve Jones or judges Paula Abdul or Nicole Scherzinger for the next season of The X Factor.

- After being diagnosed as pre-diabetic, Alec Baldwin cut sugar out of his diet, and he claims he's lost 30 pounds in the past four months.

The Hangover Part II - DVD Review

★½

Starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zack Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, Paul Giamatti, Justin Bartha, Jeffrey Tambor, Mason Lee, Jamie Chung and Nick Cassavetes.  Directed by Todd Phillips.

When I think of the best sequels, they contain elements of the first movie, but they stand up solidly as their own story. Aliens, Godfather II, Empire Strikes Back, The Dark Knight. Some of the worst try to be carbon copies, hitting all the same beats but with tiny tiny differences. This unfortunately falls into that latter camp.

The movie begins the same way the first one did. Phil on the phone letting a bride-to-be know they've really messed up this time. Flashback to one week earlier.

Phil, Stu, Alan and Doug are together again, going to Thailand for Stu's wedding. They take Stu's future brother-in-law Teddy with them for "just one drink" on the beach. Cut to the next morning. Phil, Stu and Alan wake up in a trashed apartment with no idea what happened. But it's Bangkok instead of Vegas. And the surprise animal in the bathroom is a monkey instead of a tiger.

And it keeps going and going just like that, right down to the slide show of their wild night during the closing credits. It is basically the same movie as the first one, but far less funny.

Catherine Zeta-Jones as Russell Crowe's cheating wife

- Catherine Zeta-Jones will play the philandering wife of the New York mayor (Russell Crowe) in Broken City, directed by Allen Hughes (co-director of Book of Eli). Mark Wahlberg co-stars as a private investigator hired by the mayor to confirm his suspicions.

- Tyler Perry has signed Kim Kardashian to a supporting role in his next movie The Marriage Counselor.

- Joseph Gordon-Levitt (50/50) is in talks to join Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, reuniting him with his Inception co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. It also stars Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Don Johnson, Dennis Christopher, Gerald McRaney, M.C. Gainey and Laura Cayouette.

- Bradley Cooper is the front-runner to star in Steven Soderbergh's big-screen treatment of the action-comedy The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Random Movie News 10/7/11

- Robert Downey Jr. will produce and star in the big-screen adaptation of Perry Mason. The 1950's TV courtroom drama starring Raymond Burr was based on a series of books, and the movie is going back to those source materials for the characters.

- Johnny Depp will star in a biopic about Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel).

- Dominic Purcell (Prison Break) has joined the cast of Paradise Lost. Directed by Alex Proyas, it's based on John Milton's classic about the battle between Michael (Benjamin Walker) and Lucifer (Bradley Cooper). Casey Affleck, Djimon Hounsou, Camilla Belle and Callan McAuliffe co-star.

- New Regency, in its deal with Fox, has picked up distribution rights to Broken City, starring Russell Crowe as a mayor who secretly hires a P.I. (Mark Wahlberg) to see if his wife's being unfaithful, but then she turns up dead.

Limitless - DVD Review

lll

Starring Bradley Cooper, Robert DeNiro, Abbie Cornish, Anna Friel, Johnny Whitworth and Robert Burke. Directed by Neil Burger.

When a movie has such a good idea, I'm really rooting for them to be creative with it and take me places I didn't anticipate. While it never surprised me, other than one dumb move, this character handled his new powers pretty much the same way I'd like to think I would.

Bradley Cooper plays Eddie, a would-be novelist who's in a funk. He just can't seem to get his wheels spinning in life. But he's offered a chance. He's given an experimental pill that'll let him access 100% of his brain capacity. He takes it, and he's suddenly a genius.

The movie deals slickly with the boost of intelligence, and with the subtext of addiction. The science... meh, who cares, let's enjoy the ride. It's a great "what if" premise that ventures down some dangerous roads when some deadly people hunt him down to get their hands on his drug.