Sunday, December 27, 2009

Up In The Air


Not the feel good movie of the Christmas (that's right I said Christmas not Holiday) season, but UP IN THE AIR is a good one. It's not the best film of the year by any means and I honestly believe that the critics say UP IN THE AIR is the best is because they don't like it when genre films are the bread winner of 2009. George Clooney is cool. Men want to be him and women want to...date him. Clooney is 100% in this movie. He plays Ryan Bingham a corporate headhunter who's job is his life. Home for him is traveling, connections at airports, and executive status at the Hilton. He has a number in mind for frequent flyer miles only he hasn't hit it yet. Set in his ways Ryan's life is threatened when his company brings him home and “grounds” him. His company now fires people over the Internet. Unhappy with this Bingham proves to his boss that the new system is flawed. With success Ryan's boss puts him back in the air but with one condition, he takes the young woman that helped create new Internet job firing tool with him to show her the ropes in the real world. Along the way Ryan meets a woman who's business also includes a lot of flying. Will Ryan finally “connect” with someone besides his job?
Director Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking, Juno) does a really good job at keeping George Clooney and the story around his character interesting. A lot of people left the theater not liking the ending but I thought it ended the only way it could end. The only thing this movie should get is a Oscar nomination for Clooney basically playing a character loosely based on himself which is a hard thing to pull off, just ask Mike Tyson for when he was in THE HANGOVER.

I give UP IN THE AIR a very high C+

~Caleb

Friday, December 18, 2009

Avatar


This particular review has taken me several hours to even start writing because I am still pondering what I saw at 12:00am this morning? Leaving the theater I felt awe struck and let down at the same time. My biggest problem with the film I will get out of the way and that's the fact that the movie is long. When I see this again very soon my problem with the length very well may go away because it wont be 3:00am.

AVATAR has been a film seven plus years in the making and in a lot of movie geeks opinions the movie to end all movies. The director of AVATAR James Cameron is one of the greatest filmmakers of our time and I consider myself a fan of his work. What I am not a fan of our some of his fans who think he is the god of action/science fiction film making. Come on guys ALIENS and T2: JUDGEMENT DAY were forever ago, its time to move forward and thats what Cameron has done with AVATAR. I am not going to bore you with how one can make the observation that AVATAR could be DANCES WITH WOLVES in space. The Internet is already filled with that stuff like that. Yes, the story going on in AVATAR has been done over and over again but you have never seen it told like this.

In the future Earth is out of resources and finds what they are looking for in deep space on a moon called Pandora. Jake which is a paraplegic war vet takes the place of his late twin brother on a project to learn about the moon's indigenous humanoid race called the Na'vi and this is achieved by a taking on a “avatar”identity. A “avatar” is more or less a incarnation of a hybrid Na'vi and earthling humanoid.
In Jake's “avatar form he is sent to get to know the culture of the Na'vi and tell them to move away from their home so the corporation he works for can mine and bulldoze for Pandora's rich and wonderful resource. Jake falls in love with the culture and race of Pandora so naturally he joins forces with them to protect what the Na'vi call home.

I got really bored with this part of the story because these moments just seemed to drag out forever. With that being said, what makes me really like this movie a lot is how the groundbreaking 3D and motion capture effects made Pandora come alive. This has to be seen to be believed and you just have to trust me on this because trying to explain what I saw on screen would just come across as rambling.

Blockbuster or flop one thing is for certain AVATAR has set the standard for 3D special effects film making.

B+