9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

Two words, plus requisite emphasized punctuation, to review the entire movie:

“FUCKING SWEET (PERIOD)”

I will have to see it again. Probably the best Marvel movie to date by far… perhaps even better than Spidey 2.

I am not a big fan of westerns, per se. As a kid, I enjoyed playing cowboys and indians as much as the next white bread kid on the block, but as an adult (I spit a little whenever I say that dirty word), the whole cowboy schtick feels way overdone in the realm of movies. It is a genre so full of cliche’s, that it has transcended cliche into some uber-realm of cliche-parody-cliche’s. Oh, trust me, I know that doesn’t make much sense. And that is my point. Westerns just don’t make much sense anymore. Logically, culturally, emotionally… John Wayne would not be doing Westerns anymore if he was alive.

(Side note: Imagine a young John Wayne replacing Keanu Reeves as the young everyman in the Matrix. Discuss.)

I watched 3:10 to Yuma over the weekend. And while it was a tragic and brutal and full of unbridled amounts of tension, it also did something I was not really expecting from a remake.

It made me think.

3:10 to Yuma has bad guys, but the not bad guys you expect. It has good guys, but not the good guys that make you want to cheer. The tension is well done, well paced, and overall the movie just sucks you in. It addresses moral issues as a very real, accessible level for all of us. It doesn’t give us villains and heroes in the traditional sense (plenty of the side characters do fulfill those traditional roles), but it does give us men who seem to think, characters that actually transcend the situation they are in.

They portray more than just a western, they portray a conflict of perhaps real people and real questions about what it is to be hero and what it is to be a villain.

It all depends on the circumstances… the world is just shades of gray.

And for that alone, it was a great movie. But there was so much more that made it even better.

Russell Crowe and Christian Bale both deliver great performances, the cinematography is killer, and the climatic payoff at the end is so worth the lost fingernails chewed off through the movie.

But its not a movie I could watch twice. Just because it is brutal. And the effects team definitely shows it off with lavish.

300 was a great movie for three reasons…

1. The comic book is one my all time favs. Frank Miller is a great story teller.
2. The movie is executed brilliantly, despite what critics say. (They are all art-house humping hemp smokers anyway.)
3. It sparks interest in the real event, The Battle of Thermopylae, which truly is one of the greatest heroic events of all time. King Leonidas was a Spartan King worthy of remembering.

Yeah, the movie takes liberties… but it is a fantasy movie after all. The core of the film, the heart of it, is what stays true and makes for a great flick. It may not be historically accurate… but that wouldn’t be watchable on the big screen.

For the same reason most books would not make a good movie if done literally. Artistic License is a necessary thing to make movies accessible and understandable to all.

That is why I hate people comparing movies to books. Apples and Oranges. Nay, more like apples and palm trees.

Completely different.

Movies only deserve measure by other movies. And the same is for books.

But comics and movies based on those comics – both visual mediums. Both can make for great translation.

300 proves the point.

No seriously. I had doubts. Michael Bay’s normal crap really is tedious junk.

But his “style” works here. I don’t know how, I don’t know what stars aligned, but it was way better than it could have been. It could have been a big steaming pile.

Don’t get me wrong, it had a few weak points. But still….

ROCK!

Every magic trick has three phases, the Pledge, where you draw your audience in with a promise, the Turn, where the audience is unsure of the act is truly complete, and the Prestige, where the magician pulls it off with the final piece of the trick.

I saw The Prestige on Friday, and I must say, although disturbing, it is a great film. At first I felt that the lack of a true villain and a true hero really made the plot hard to get behind, but as the film worked its way through the feud of Victorian magic, both real and unreal, and the complex mysteries surrounding one man’s murder by a fellow magician, it worked in the movie’s favor. The plot itself was not complex, but the narrative threading it’s way through the different character timelines made it sometimes a little confusing. Not the bad kind of confusion where have no idea what is going on, but the subtle confusion of a true magic trick.

As I left the theater I felt conflicted about the outcome, The Prestige, of the movie, but since then, the movie could not have ended any other way.

The story of two rival illusionist’s should not go missed. Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale and the director, Chris Nolan all do a wonderful job making the acts of Victorian magic seem real. And the ending is even more brilliant if you love movies that transcend genres.

Highly recommended!