Xmen: The Last Stand

Will have the review soon. Stay tuned.

Thanks!

Poseidon

The first time I saw a preview for this, I got excited about it. After all, "Poseidon Adventure" is one of my favorites in what I call the "Oh my God! We're all gonna die!" movie genre. My other favorites in that genre are - "The Towering Inferno," and "Titanic."

Anyway, I was further excited by the fact that Kurt Russell's going to be in it! That guy is a class act, in my book, cause unlike other action stars his age, Russell is aging gracefully and not running around with young whores, getting their ears pierced and whatnot.

But again, I digress.

So, as the day of its premier got nearer, I kept hearing bad things about it. I didn't let that stop me one bit. I was dying to see how they remade the movie and my curiousity, once piqued, MUST be satisfied.

Anyway, on to the movie. It had a rough start. The obligatory character setup was annoying. Instead of giving us a clue as to what these people's stories are, we're force-fed half-assed backgrounds of their life. Unless, of course, I missed it all, but what happened to Kurt Russell and why was his Mayor-ship of New York so bad? Why was Josh Lucas' character so freakin' jaded? And what was up with Richard Dreyfuss? Was he supposed to be gay?

But we move on to THE tidal wave. Now, in the original flick, they said it was a tsunami, something they had been warned with. In the remake, the tidal wave just came out of nowhere. No warnings were triggered. They called it a "rogue wave," a massive tidal wave that's rare and pretty damn random.

Whatever.

So, the boat flips over, everyone's screaming and shouting. What bugged me about this movie was how graphic the "killings" were. I mean, you see all these bodies tossed around like a thing that gets tossed around a lot or bodies being impaled, burned and drowned. Like, gee, thanks for not sugar coating it for me. Gosh!

The boat finally settles down, everyone is trying to get a grip, but not our super-heroes, our group of 7 or 8 people (I forget, in the end, who gets killed or not - oh, did you think ALL our main characters survived?? Sorry, SPOILER ALERT!), decide they don't want to take a chance being at the bottom of the boat, as it were.

The next hour trudges along with annoying scenes filled with women who do nothing to help advance women's lib, children not doing what their mother tells them to do, and with men acting like nothing fazes them.

This movie, in my opinion, was one hour too long.

The Da Vinci Code

Robert Langdon: I'm into something here that I cannot understand.

You know what popped into my head when he said that? That scene in "Big" where Tom Hanks attended an office meeting for the first time as an "adult," and he raised his hand at the end of the presentation and he said, "I don’t get it."

Neither do I. I mean, what is Tom Hanks doing in this movie? Isn’t his time, and ours for that matter, better spent with a more worthy movie like, oh I don’t know "Big Again," or "Toy Story 3"?

And I was severely disappointed with Audrey Tatou’s presence in the movie. Not that I could ever think her performance was bad (side note: I have adored her ever since I saw her in "Amelie"), I was just disappointed she was in it. She’s better than that. Are there no other French female actresses out there?

I'm not going to talk about the book, cause frankly that's been done and I'm just too tired to start a debate with any of you. That and this is a movie review, not a book review. But I would've preferred to have seen "Angels and Demons" on the big screen. I preferred A&D anyway.

I walked out of the movie theater feeling like I wish I had never read the book before I saw the movie. I never got the feeling from Langdon that he even knew what he was talking about, except for the fact that he's very very good with anagrams. Same thing with Sophie, I couldn't buy the reason why she had a falling-out with Sauniere. They kept skirting around that little piece of history, that it ended up with Langdon just blurting it out, "give, woman! WTF happened??" (No, he didn't really say that, but if you are reading this, I'll assume you already saw the movie). And when she finally shared her story, it didn't seem too traumatic to me. What? You don't encounter ritualistic orgies in your neighborhood? I call it Wednesday night.

The only character I actually liked was Silas (Paul Bettany). One scene that stuck to my mind was when Silas confronted the Nun after discovering the stone tablet that lead to nowhere. For some reason, I was eerily moved by how he calmly exercised the last rites for the person he just killed.

Then there's Jean Reno, another Frenchy favorite of mine. He didn't seem all that intimidating to me. His obsession to chase down Langdon came off merely as a nuisance to his good conscience.

It was one letdown after another. But isn't that usually the undeniable fate of a hyped-up book turned into a movie? At least with the first Harry Potter movie, you can shrug it off because it was targeted for a younger, less sophisticated audience. But there's no excuse for the Da Vinci Code, you don't hire sure-bet talents and fall short, you just don't.

But I did get something out of this movie. An addiction to anagrams. Did you know that the anagram to my real full name is: Damnable Injury. Just thought I'd throw that little fact in there for you folks.

Mission: Impossible 3

Got mixed feelings about this movie. On the one hand, there's a lot of action going on. But on the other hand, there's a lot of action going on. It almost made you forget that there was supposed to be a purpose to all the action, you know, like a story?

I had low expectations of this movie as I have lost all respect for Tom Cruise. But I had to respect what he's done to the franchise. No matter what I personally think of the movie overall, I have to admit I still felt a thrill at hearing that theme song, I still enjoyed the whole cloak & dagger action, and even the predictable twists in the story.

For let us not forget that this is, after all, just a movie whose sole mission in life, should you choose to watch it, is to entertain. And it did just that.