Movie Review: Skyline

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Sometimes a movie trailer shows promise and looks interesting. But then you go to the movie and realize the two are very different items. This is one of those times when you got sold a bill of good. Skyline was really flat lined.

The audience is dropped right into the middle of the action right as the movie begins. We meet Jarrod and Elaine (Eric Balfour and Scottie Thompson) who are staying with friends Terry and Candice (Donald Faison and Brittany Daniel). As they sleep, blue lights start falling from the night sky of Los Angeles. They are awoken by rumbling to discover people are being taken away by the blue lights. We are being invaded by aliens ala Independence Day. Creatures are coming out and taking people ala Cloverfield. We watch the military try to take out the alien ships like the military attacking Godzilla all to no avail.

Ho Hum. For the main players we are never given any reason to cheer for them and hope they live. Just like a typical slasher horror film, one by one by one they are taken out in a cliche manner. The acting is very wooden, the scenes are very choppy. The special effects of the ships could have been impressive, but as we look at some of the ships and creatures which appear to be part mechanical and part living organism, there are either heat or cloud or dust or some sort of distortion obscuring the intricacies. Certain plot details are shown but aren't given a pay off or are ignored or even worse, contradicted. They try to use a time line of events, but what for? It doesn't make sense.

When you discover what the aliens want and how they go about getting it you wonder how this could be happening. It doesn't make sense, repeating to emphasize the point and the ending is just horrible. It could be set up for a sequel I guess but hopefully, mercifully it won't happen. This movie wasn't given advanced screenings for review usually indicating you have a stinker on your hands. As I write this, on Rotten Tomatoes it has an 11% fresh rating.

The movie is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence, some language, and brief sexual content with a running time of 92 minutes. My suggestion would be if you start heading towards the light of this movie, turn around and make a bee line away from Skyline.

The Movie Monkey

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Movie Review: Megamind

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Alright, I admit it. I don't like Will Ferrell and I went to see a Will Ferrell movie. Luckily it was only the voice of Will Farrell and not the man boy Will Ferrell that drives me nuts! But just like many of his man boys who had big or over inflated egos, so too was the ego of Megamind.

The story is a superhero story but at the same time, not. We get the origin story of a superhero and his archenemy as told from the archenemy point of view. It also calls into the question of nature vs nurture. Are superheros and archenemies automatically superheros and archenemies by birth or are they created because of their environments, their living conditions or the people that exerted influence on them. And then, the big "What If" question. What if the superhero was destroyed by the archenemy? What then. All questions brought to bear in this movie.

Brad Pitt voices Metroman who is the yin to Ferrell's Megamind's yang. Roxanne Ritchi voiced by Tina Fey was the constant target of Megamind for Metroman to rescue. But she's a reporter with spunk and a camera man, Hal (voiced by Jonah Hill) who has a crush on her too! He follows her like a little puppy dog but she doesn't get the clues that he likes her.

The last main character who didn't get recognition in the trailers was David Cross who played Tobias on Fox's Arrested Development and now plays Andy Weeks on Running Wilde. He plays Megamind's side kick, Minion. He's a fish that has his bowl attached to a body that looks like a mechanical ape with a ghost buster proton pack like attachment on his back. Weird stuff. And what is it about Minions with animated films lately. First you have the little yellow pills helping Gru in Despicable Me and now an adroit furry mechanized body with a fish brain. Very odd coincidence that they would use the same word in both movies!

Then a number of questions are begged: What sort of goals does a bad guy set when the good guy is no longer around? What if the good guy gets tired of it all and just wants to get away and chill for a while? Can the bad guy ever get the girl? Interesting hypotheses for a PG rated for action and some language computer animated film. And as we saw in The Social Network ladies, watch how you burn your guy because that unrequited affection may come back to bite you in the butt!

The universe of these superheros didn't collide with the superhero and villain universe from The Incredibles. Otherwise things would have looked a lot different for our heroes and villains. Edna Mode would have had a cow dahling. Fringe on Metroman's costume, puhleez, it was a hobo suit. AND everyone had capes! Edna would have read them the riot act! Too much of it Dahling...NO CAPES!

The 2D version looked fine. I can't see where the 3D would have been any super improvement. With the computer generated images, there were a couple of background details that I noticed like small waves of water washing over pavement or the way buildings were crumbling showing attention to some of the finer points. Ultimately, we want a movie that looks good and has a good plot too. We got a little of both in this 96 minute movie. Don't leave the theater right away when the credit start to run. There is an extra scene before the main credits roll and it's sort of cute in what it revealed.

The Movie Monkey

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Movie Review: I Want Your Money

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The weekend of the political documentary continues! As I write this mid term elections are three days away. I was waiting in line for TRON Night at my local Regal Cinema when I saw the movie poster. It was staring me in the face about five feet away with a giant caricature of Barack Obama as Uncle Sam pointing directly at me. How could I not pay admission to see this when the large font words tell me I Want Your Money!

Writer and Director Ray Griggs presents the audience with information about some of the relationships between Presidents their fiscal policies and the economy starting back with Roosevelt running up through the current administration. We get some charts and graphs showing us numbers as well as archive footage and interviews like you'd find in any documentary. One of the cute points of this movie was the use of computer generated caricatures of Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, the Bushs I and II, Nancy Pelosi, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and the Gubanator, Ahhhnuld to help tell the story and illustrate points along the way. There were also a lot of jokes cracked by the caricatures which helped lighten the mood of an otherwise serious topic.

Griggs points to policies and how the economy either rose or fell. He points out that while many people thought Roosevelt's New Deal was a good thing he points out the numbers that would state otherwise. He pointed out while many people point out Reagan's tax cuts were for the rich he emphasizes that the cuts were across all levels of income. He does spend a lot of time on Reagan and often uses the Gipper to stress main points either through the computer character or archive footage.

What I thought was compelling is when Griggs had footage of Reagan and Obama run back to back. You can see the difference in attitude of the two men and how they feel about government's intrusion or lack thereof into people's lives. The one part that I had questions about was his use of a story about a college professor using a socialist grading system where all the students would get the same grade. Ray Griggs responded to a twitter saying I was seeing the movie with a thank you. I replied back to him asking where he got the story. In the half a day since posing the question, I googled and the story almost verbatim showed up on Snopes as a legend. Griggs looses points there for the moment unless he can authoritatively post a reliable source.

Overall it was a good movie looking at who is best at spending money, the individual making decisions for themselves or the government making decisions for them. While some things may look good for one person, the affects on another and the Law of Unintended Consequences should not be dismissed with the wave of a hand. In the end he encourages us to go out and vote on November 2. Unfortunately, I don't think enough people will be able to see this movie in the weekend before the elections to make a real impact on the electorate.

The movie runs for 92 minutes and is rated PG for thematic elements, brief language and smoking.

The Movie Monkey

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Movie Review: Waiting for Superman

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his was the weekend of the political documentary. Today was I Want Your Money talking out the taxing and spending cycles that have gone on in the USA for nearly a century. Yesterday's movie was Waiting for Superman and of the two this one got me more riled up. Although they are both good, I would not wait and recommend seeing Waiting for Superman as soon as it becomes available in your area. It released on October 8, 2010 and released in Honolulu on the 22nd, two weeks later!

Coming from the director of 2006's An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim takes a look at the public school system in the US. Back in 2001 he looked at five teachers as they started their teaching career in The First Year. He saw first hand the effort these teachers put into their classrooms. Even with this extra insight to schools, he admits right at the front of the movie that he has made the decision to send his kids to private school. That's a good disclaimer to know right away and kind of lets you know where he's going to head with the narrative of the movie.

The title of the movie came from an interview with Geoffrey Canada, an educator and administrator from Harlem. With archive footage of the old Superman TV show with George Reeves he says that the day he learned there was no superman he cried. He cried because he realized there wasn't someone there as a backup to help people. In his own way, he has become a superman in the Harlem area with the school Harlem Children's Zone. Canada, the man not the country, has shown that low income students can perform when the environment is right.

Guggenheim follows five children in different parts of the country: Los Angeles, Washington DC, Bronx, Harlem and Silicon Valley. There is a traditional family, two single moms, a household where mom works instead of dad and where grandma has stepped up to take care of her grandson after his dad passed away. We see the hopes from both care givers and students and where they are at and where they want to go in regards to schools. Not all schools and instructors are created equal and the families know this. Guggenheim shows why.

Through the use of interviews, media clips and cute graphics, the problems are laid out and explained with details and numbers. What was telling were clips of each of the past Presidents saying that they wanted to be the Education President. Even though more money, even when taking inflation into account, has been poured into education, we as a country aren't showing improvements and in some ways are going backwards. National, state and sometimes local mandates create a system of land mines that teachers, parents and administrators must walk through.

I watched this film transfixed by the information presented and when the 102 minutes was over, I have never walked out of a theater so angry, mad, frustrated, helpless and sad at what I had seen. This would include watching The Cove! Part of the story hit home after what happened in Hawaii with what was called Furlough Fridays. Due to budget restrictions, instead of the union allowing cutting pay for all the teachers evenly across the board, the decision was made between the executive branch, the Department of Education and the Board of Education to take every other Friday off. Many parents were upset about this and rightfully so. Unfortunately, I think their anger was directed in the wrong direction.

Michelle Rhee was highlighted in the movie where as Chancellor of the Washington DC school District she tried to make an improvement. With pay as an incentive, she tried to get rid of tenure and pay those that performed a six digit salary. Because the union wanted to participate in a form of communism (my words) where they didn't want to have levels of teachers, but each was paid the same, the union wouldn't even bring the proposal to the teachers for a vote. It was demonstrated how district after district in the US can't get rid of bad and under performing teachers and instead shuffles them around. The politicians and administrators know what the problem is but because of contracts they can't fix it. It was announced earlier this month (October 2010) that Rhee would be resigning from her position at end of the month.

Through all of this, the kids should be foremost. I have to give it to the parents that showed they were concerned and wanted the best for their children and were involved in their child's educational process. But to get into the schools that proved they could educate the children coming through the door when the number of requests exceed the number of seats, it's left up to chance. A randomly computer generated number, a pulled piece of paper or even a bingo ball decided the fate of these kids. One comment was made in the film that it wasn't about the kids, it was about the adults.

It was heart wrenching to watch the lottery process. One of the kids, Daisy from LA, really knows that she wants to be a nurse, doctor or veterinarian. To see the look on her face as the numbers were being pulled showed that she knew fully well that her future would be determined by that lottery process. Just like pulling scratch tickets from the local 7-11 (except Hawaii and Utah as they don't have state lotteries) there are winners and losers but instead of a few dollars, we're talking about affecting someone's life for either the positive or the negative.

As I review what I wrote I can see that I've gotten a bit out of experience/review mode and into preachy mode. That's the impact this film had on me. I believe if you watch it you'll have a similar reaction. It was rated PG for some thematic material, mild language and incidental smoking. The closing credits were creative and informative. While no easter egg at the end, I'd suggest watching the credits the whole way through.

The Movie Monkey

To subscribe to the audio podcast of the reviews via iTunes click here. Audio versions are released the following Wednesday.