Extract Review

I went in to this one with little knowledge other than it was a Mike Judge film and that Jason Bateman runs an extract company. Naturally people started likening it to Office Space, which I completely agree with, if Office Space were unfunny, boring and pointless. "Anyone seen a pallet of funny around here?"

Let me put it this way, there were 8 people in the theater when the movie started. There were 3 left at the end. One left within the first 15 minutes, two left about halfway, and two more left about two-thirds of the way through. Yes, it was perfectly consistent in it's badness. Although I'm really not sure if bad is the right word. It was as if we were walking by an extract plant, stopped for a few weeks to observe what was happening (not all that much aside from an accidental de-testicling), and then continued on our merry way, completely unaffected by what we saw.

As far as I knew, this was supposed to be a comedy. I've laughed more at baptisms than I did throughout this film. Laugh count: 2 and both in the last 10 minutes. Once was at a name Ben Affleck calls someone and the other is at a bizarre and still massively insignificant twist at the end. Yes, babies getting water poured on their heads is indeed funnier. How can this be written by the same guy who brought us Office Space, Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill? It seems impossible, especially with all the people in it who we KNOW are funny- JK Simmons, Kristen Wiig, David Koechner, Mila Kunis and the list goes on.

There isn't a whole lot more to say about this. All of the performances are bland, none of the characters are compelling, and neither is the story. Like grass, it's just there. Walk by it and don't think twice because you're really not missing anything.

1 & 1/2 out of 5 Stars

Inglourious Basterds Review

Inglourious Basterds
(Spoiler-Free)

A ton of buzz has been abound for a while on this one, since the earliest trailer of Brad Pitt doing his Foghorn Leghorn impression. I wasn't enthralled with it. It looked like another self-indulgent, Quentin Tarantino one-trick pony like Death Proof was. A bunch of Jewish soldiers killing and scalping Nazis? Gotcha. What else is there?

Turns out it wasn't all ultra-violence as promised by the trailer everybody was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs about. For a man who "wants his (100) scalps" from each member of his squad, we only get to see the taking of about two. Perhaps Mr. Jolie should've told his men he wanted "lots of talking in German and French in scenes that could've been one tenth as long'." Because there was plenty of that.

We've been duped folks. Not as advertised whatsoever. Tarantino at least told us he was making a genre film with Death Proof, he failed to tell us he was doing it again with Inglourious Basterds. This is a foreign film of dual plots to take out some high ranking Nazis that come together at a movie premiere. Whether we were duped for better or for worse is up for discussion.

I enjoyed the plot, even though it wasn't what I was told it would be. The Basterds are actually only half of the equation here and Pitt is really not even the lead. Those honors would go to Christoph Waltz who plays Col. Hans Landa, a.k.a. the Jew Hunter, a subtly evil Nazi officer. Waltz plays this role to such perfection, I had to be reminded by 40 minutes of Adam Carolla gushing over him on his podcast to really understand. The German actor speaks 4 languages in this movie and is so believable in his role it is easy to gloss over his amazing performance.

On the flip side, Pitt is almost too goofy for me to get past and in my opinion, his role would've been best played by someone else. Why go for realism by casting real German and French actors to play those roles, then have Pitt play a guy with a thick Southern accent for no apparent reason? Even an incognito Mike Myers does a better job in his one scene. The rest of the actual Basterds don't get much to do or say really, aside from Eli Roth, a.k.a. the Bear Jew and B.J. Novak a.k.a. The Little Man. Roth swings a bat, like all Jewish Bears do, and B.J. Novak basically plays his oft-belittled character from The Office in the final scenes.

Tarantino orchestrates some thick, thick tension in several scenes like the French farmhouse opener, which evoked memories of the Dennis Hopper-Christopher Walken faceoff in True Romance, (also penned by QT). The basement bar and the restaurant were also white knuckle scenes, but these could've been cut down a bunch to keep the pace up. We are usually granted a satisfactory conclusion to each one, though, except for the very final scene.

The end of the film is cool, and isn't what you'll probably expect, so much credit to Quenten for that. It would've been cooler though, had it coincided with history, but arrived there through the events of the movie. And the very final scene loses a lot of it's "Whoah factor" by having the same act perpetrated earlier on.

Inglourious Basterds is worth a watch, but much like Judd Apatow's Funny People, it suffers from the self-indulgency that established writers/directors are afforded these days.

3 & 1/2 out of 5 stars
-J

District 9 Vs. The Hurt Locker

I finally got to see two movies I've been anticipating since we did our Summer Movie Preview podcasts way back in May, District 9 & The Hurt Locker. While both have gotten almost nothing but praise, one clearly outshined the other. (Spoiler-free)

District 9

Watching this movie is like eating a multi-course gourmet meal. It starts off great and gets better and better as the courses go on, as you cherish every damn second of it. District 9 is about aliens whose ship has come to rest above Johannesburg, South Africa. As they have tended to do in Johannesburg, the aliens are sequestered into a slum called District 9 where tension between aliens and humans have reached a boiling point over twenty plus years. A corporation called MNU has been contracted to move the aliens to a new area outside the city and the story picks up with Wikus van der Merwe, played by Sharlto Copley, the bumbling son-in-law of the boss, in charge of the move.

Going in to this, I did my best to not read too much and keep what I knew strictly to what I saw in the teaser trailer months ago. I'm glad I did. Instead of an aliens vs. humans civil war, we are treated to a multi-layered, Apartheid-meets-Kafka, buddy/action political satire, told seamlessly through narrative and documentary styles. Director Neill Blomkamp deserves all the credit in the world for putting out something this amazing and CGI dependent on a 30 million dollar budget. After hearing all the post-Comic-con buzz, I became very worried about it living up to the hype, but District 9 lives up to it and surpasses it, too.

The Hurt Locker

When compared to District 9, The Hurt Locker comes off as a one-trick pony. The movie follows three soldiers in an elite bomb disarmament unit in Baghdad and does a tremendous job of putting you smack into the middle of the action and the white-knuckle anticipation of action that these sodliers actually face every day. What it lacks though, is character development. Sure a selling point of the movie has been that since the cast is mainly unknowns, you never know who is going to get blown up next, but 30 minutes in, that's just not true, and besides, trying to guess who will bite it next does not a good film make.

The Hurt Locker feels thin to me because there really isn't much going on aside from it taking you from one situation to the next. It's almost more documentary-like in structure than District 9, without actually looking like hand-held news footage. Only one scene about halfway through really shows the three leads doing anything other than their jobs and getting into their lives back home, which doesn't lead to much sympathy for the characters. The situations are quite intense and you will find yourself gripping your armrest without knowing it several times, for instance, the sniper situation, the car bomb and suicide bomber scenes. Director Kathryn Bigelow makes you believe in these scenarios 100%, but that's really all this movie has going for it. While not bad in any way, it could've been a bit shorter and used a bit more emotion.

District 9: 4&1/2 out of 5 Stars, The Hurt Locker: 3 & 1/2 out of 5 Stars

-Jay