Battleship (2012)

Ugh.  I never thought that in our lifetimes we would be seeing movies based upon board games.  The video games into movies phenomenon was pretty much bad enough, but board games?  How long until there’s a goddamn Uno movie?  And do you know how much it made at the box office?  Over $300 million.  And I just spent two hours of my life watching it too, so who are the real criminals here?  The existence of this movie raises so many rhetorical nonsense questions.

Directed by Peter Berg, Battleship has very little to do with the board game that “inspired” the screenplay.  There’s literally one fucking scene in the movie where they are targeting enemy ships, and they aren’t even human ships, they’re goddamn alien ships.  I suppose we’ve become so sensitive as a society that we are not willing to label any country an enemy if there’s a chance that the movie will make money over there, so they had to make the enemies goddamn aliens.

The disaster film / USA! USA! USA! film genre is chock full of amazingly terrifying images, especially with the advent of CGI.  I remember watching 2012 and thinking “wow, it appears we’ve all gotten over that whole 9/11 thing because this is literally the most traumatic purposely filmed movie I’ve ever seen.”  Battleship involves many of those scenes, except they generally take place in Hong Kong (which I’ve grown kind of fond of thanks to playing “Sleeping Dogs” lately) and involve a disturbing disregard for the amount of human lives lost there.  So there’s that.

The cast is filled with pretty Hollywood people and inexplicably Rihanna as well.  Not that she’s not pretty or whatever, it’s just Why?  Taylor Kitsch continues to show that his John Carter performance wasn’t a one-hit wonder with another charismatic leading role here.  Still has a stupid name, though.  Ugh, I’m done writing this.  It’s a popcorn movie that is dumb and don’t think about it too hard because you’ll end up confusing yourself.

1.5 / 5

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

I don’t even know how to go about starting this review.  Having just watched it, I feel both emotionally and mentally exhausted while at the same time thrilled and ecstatic over what I’ve just borne witness to.  The Christopher Nolan Batman Trilogy is one of the greatest accomplishments in cinema history, not just for a comic book movie, because as I stated in my Avengers review, the Nolan Batman movies are above just being classified as comic book movies.  Despite attempting to avoid any and all spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises, I had read a Cracked article last year that had mentally prepared me for anything Nolan might have in store for us.  At least I thought it had.

When we last left Batman (Christian Bale) at the end of The Dark Knight, he had told Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) to lay the blame for Harvey Dent’s death at the hands of Batman, thus giving Dent a martyr-like status in the eyes of the citizens of Gotham City.  Between Dark Knight and this film, eight years have passed and Gordon has used The Dent Act to clean up Gotham with his police forces, as Batman retired to his secret identity of Bruce Wayne rather than be hunted.  Wayne has become a recluse, appearing to only communicate with his butler Alfred (Michael Caine) in regards to affairs of the outside world.  When an attractive cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) makes off with a Wayne family heirloom, something is awakened in Bruce and he begins to come alive again.  All the while, a cerebral and brutal villain by the name of Bane (Tom Hardy) concocts a plan to bring the city of Gotham to its knees.  Then there’s also Officer John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a hotheaded young man who comes to the attention of both Wayne and Gordon.

That’s as vague as I can get without giving away any surprises in the plot, but also identifying the major players.  As with many Nolan films, he brings back a lot of familiar faces in his casting, and just take a look at all the tags if you want to see identifiable names jump out at you.  A couple of them are minor spoilers, but not really surprises at all.  While I’m writing this review, I’m taking time to read the Wiki entry for Dark Knight Rises and it says numerous times that Nolan was unsure about coming back for a third film.  Nolan might just be a great actor himself, because there are certain aspects of the story that would suggest just the opposite: that Nolan had been planning the entire Trilogy from the very first film.

There are few movie trilogies that I have given perfect marks to all of the installments.  The Toy Story Trilogy is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, and now even that is going to fall by the wayside since apparently Toy Story 4 has been announced to be in production.  The Batman Trilogy is exactly that.  Nolan won’t come back to make a fourth film, neither will Bale, neither will any of the principles.  Even the way Rises ends should not fill people with hope for that to happen.

Everything in Rises is excellent in my eyes.  From the casting, the acting, the set pieces, the direction, the writing (minus a couple little things that I won’t go into here, and may just be inconsequential in future re-watchings), the action, all breathtakingly great.  During the opening sequence I was legitimately catching my breath, wondering if my nerves could handle the end of this storied franchise.  The sheer menace that Bane brings with him is astonishingly well-executed, and Hardy doesn’t let the mask control his acting.  Hathaway is probably the best Catwoman/Selina Kyle ever, because she’s not used as just a vehicle for puns.  Bale and his familiar cast mates deliver exactly what they did in the first two films, sheer awesomeness.

Better film critics than me will write more detailed reviews than I did, because mine just seems to be what ultimately can only be construed as nothing more than a Thank You note to Christopher Nolan and the team he put together for these three films.

5 / 5

The Social Network (2010)

In twenty years, is anyone ever going to remember The King’s Speech?  Or will they remember Inception and The Social Network, two movies that were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and – in my opinion – probably split the “holy shit this is an awesome movie” vote?  I’ve watched The King’s Speech exactly once, and it wasn’t even the best movie I saw that month, let alone the year.  Inception, Social Network, probably watched each of those 5-6 times each, and every time I watch them I notice new things about them.  It’s an embarrassment of the highest level that The King’s Speech won the Best Picture Oscar that year, completely undoing all the goodwill I had for the Academy the year before for rightfully rewarding The Hurt Locker as the Best Picture that year.  ANYWAYS.

If it weren’t for one other movie on director David Fincher’s résumé, The Social Network would be his greatest movie.  You wouldn’t think that though, being that this is a movie about creating goddamn Facebook, and Fincher has made masterful dark films, comments on society, etc. that will echo through the ages.  But everything about the movie is excellent, from the casting to Trent Reznor’s Oscar-winning score, to the cinematography, to the acting, to Aaron Sorkin’s writing.  Oh wait, there’s one aspect that isn’t excellent, and that might just be a personal opinion of mine.

Andrew Garfield.  I want to punch his smug face every time I see it onscreen.  That isn’t a fault of Fincher, Sorkin, the acting or anything.  I just loathe Garfield.  He seems so douchey.  I can’t even begin to understand how he was cast as Peter Parker in the upcoming Spider-Man reboot.  There’s nothing heroic about him, and he makes my skin crawl every minute that he’s onscreen.  I completely understood why Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) was being an asshole to him because he’s fucking Andrew Garfield.  Despite his presence, The Social Network is still a perfect movie.  Watch it with someone you want to de-friend on Facebook.

5 / 5