hautecritique

Member since 6/10/2009, last signed in awhile ago.

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Double Feature – Mall Cop Edition
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"Hollywood likes to work in pairs. Baz Luhrman had to cancel his Alexander the Great movie because Oliver Stone beat him to production. A couple of years ago there were two Truman Capote biopics. I’m sure if your search your subconscious, you’ll remember skads more. We thought it would be fun to roll the clock back to Q1 of 2009 and watch such a pair. Two movies focusing on mall security guards (or officers?). Paul Blart: Mall Cop and the Seth Rogen starring Observe and Report. On the surface, these two movies appear to be completely different… and they are. One starring a network prime-time sitcom star, the other an Apatow first-teamer. The first would seem to be cotton candy, and the second… special brownies. We, of course, start with the brownies. Click here to view the embedded video. Observe and report is listed as a comedy. It is funny, but not funny ‘ha, ha’. It really isn’t funny ‘huh?’ either. The more I think about it, the less sure I am that it’s funny at all. in fact, I’ ... " [More]

G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra

G.I. Joe – Half a Battle
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"Studios regularly release movies without screening them for critics. Usually these are in the ‘B’ movie category, not their Mega-Hits. When it is a blockbuster, no screening pretty much always means it is a huge steaming pile. This time, however, Hasbro had an explanation. It seems they blame the fact that Transformers was a full load delivered in an adult diaper on the critics. Just to show the critics who’s boss, no advance screenings for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. So, I pack up and head to the multiplex on a Friday morning. A heart full of dread for the horror about to be photon torpedoed into my retina. And honestly, I found it isn’t nearly that bad. But time is a-wastin’, so lets get straight into exactly how bad it is…. That’s what you’re here for, after all. Transformers may have been more than met the eye, but G.I. Joe was the Grande Dame of pithy sayings. For the first bit of the movie, it would seem that knowing them was half the screenplay… er, battle. They Kung-Fu gr ... " [More]

Drag Me to Hell

Drag Me to Hell
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"Drag Me To Hell was AWESOME. It was the Three Stooges meeting the Excorcist on a train through Awesometown. Sam Raimi has proven with Drag Me To Hell that he could direct Evil Dead 4 without it sucking. Hold on. Let me start at the beginning. Earlier in the day, my ladyfriend and I decided to go see Drag Me To Hell. I had been under the impression that DMtH would be a straight horror movie. I have a passing familiarity with Sam Raimi’s previous “horror” movies, but not until opening day of DMtH did I see it described as “slapstick horror”, and when I did see this description I started to get excited. I love… no, *love*… wait, LOVE the Evil Dead movies. I like horror movies well enough for the most part, but the comedy/action/horror of San Raimi’s older films tickles me deeply. I was a huge Three Stooges fan as a kid and Raimi manages to recreate that sort of mood mixed with his own gory, mystery goo-splattered flavor packet, and a dash of Dobbsian Discordianism. Overall, Sa ... " [More]

Funny People

Funny People
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"So I’m watching a movie where Adam Sandler is playing a character who is obviously designed to closely resemble Adam Sandler (in fact, much real young Adam Sandler footage is used to backstory the character) *and* I’m at the premiere where the “real” Adam Sandler is in the audience. Oh, if only I had a blunt. Ah, well, onward and upward! This is a movie about a bunch of comedians of different generations living the life of being a comedian. Three roomates: one is the sudden star of a lame sitcom; another is starting to get gigs at “The” Improv; the third, well, he has a “real” job at the food court. At first glance, this is a form of situational comedy about stand-up comedy and comedians. But that’s really just its cover, a lame-sitcom excuse for them to tell a different story. A completely different story about an aging comedian who (spoiler alert) discovers that he is dying from a rare form of leukemia and has suddenly to come to terms with his mortality and with his fai ... " [More]

Iron Man

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood ...
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"I’ve seen all the Harry Potter movies, but I am decidedly a muggle. In fact, if you are not a muggle, you have already seen this movie and discussed it ad nauseam with fellow wizards. I don’t mean that pejoratively. My wife, Mrs. Gravity, is pure magic. It was with her and a few other magic folk that I went to the matinee showing of Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince. Six posters lose the plot For a weekday showing, it was well attended. Once the strains of the familiar score started dancing in the dark, the theater was ready, more like longing, to be entranced. The familiar feeling doesn’t stop with the score. We begin with cryptic warnings of danger and doom from Professor Dumbledore. Harry, feeling cryptic warning fatigue, goes along with Dumbledore compliantly, and without a great deal of concern. And, so does the audience. Yes, there will be danger and the fate of the world will be decided in the balance. We understand all that, now let’s get on with the movie, shall we? ... " [More]

Knocked Up

420 Hangover Cures
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"It’s mostly a blur. At some point, there was someone’s house. One guy was laying on the floor with a tiny dog licking his face while he giggled uncontrollably. A friend of a friend was picked up and creeping everybody out, and Heather Graham might have called the police on him. That is when I left. Was that my bachelor party or someone else’s? Or, was I watching The Hangover? In comic book jargon, it is the gutter. That blank space between the sequence of images that allows your brain to fill in the gaps. Your imagination searches through the universe of possibilities based on the visible evidence. The Hangover translates this to the big screen. The main difference is he Dali-esque absurdity of the evidence. You see, Doug is getting married on Sunday. He and a couple of friends, along with the bride’s brother, head off for Friday night in Vegas (baby). We see them toasting to the night to come, then the film breaks and resumes late Saturday Morning. The writers take a crack at wh ... " [More]

Up, but not so high
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"I can’t say that Up was a bad movie. It was, in many ways, good. When Chicken Run came out, it was 90%+ on the Tomatometer. Over the years I’ve noticed this across the board. Animated movies can be very high (with a few exceptions). Waiting for Up, we saw trailers for two horrible looking animated features. Up, however, didn’t look horrible. The Pixar/Disney film looked great. The styles, shapes, shading and color were fantastic. They’re not done with a realist’s eye, but with true inspiration. And the writing! It was nail on the head. When they needed a sad beat, it was at their finger tips (failed at child-birth, forcing your wife needlessly up a death march of a hill to give her a poignant present, killing her before she reaches to bow on the box, a boy whose douche bag father’s new woman berates him for longing for paternal acceptance). If they needed cute, oh, that came out of thin air. Baby chicks, Seth Rogen in dog form (seriously cute)… And the Tomatometer shows it. Anothe ... " [More]

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

Pack and Play – The Breakup Bre ...
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"This week it is going to get a bit heavy, but sometimes heavy is good. To go along with each track, I wrote a short blurb as a companion. When you are ready, press play and read along. Take a break and wait for the song to finish before moving down to the next entry. The following are true stories. Only the names, places and facts have been changed. It starts here: Can I Sleep In Your Arms by Willie Nelson from Red Headed Stranger A desert canyon. A circling eagle. Willie Nelson spins up on the ipod. I look down and see a breaking news alert. A murder suicide, the worst of all breakups. We can’t know what drove them together. She had dropped out of high school and moved to Nashville, home of country music, four years earlier. She moved there to live with her boyfriend, Kieth. Those four years had come crashing down as their relationship fell apart. It wasn’t long before, working as a waitress at Dave and Buster’s, she was swept away by Steve McNair. Vacations, gifts, and even a c ... " [More]

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Transformers 2: The Megan Fox Show
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"I remember seeing the first trailer for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (T2:ROTFL?) in the theater. It was loud, and that was the best I could say. Everything that followed that first impression accelerated expectations in a death spiral. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one, Reviewers around the world sharpened their pencils and got jiggy with it, sometimes with magnificence. ”’Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times “Few elements of Fallen are completely odious unto themselves, but rolled together it becomes a wave of inescapable proportions – a literal tsunami of shit.” – Rob Humanick, The Projection Booth “It’s a wad of chaos puked onto the big screen, an arbitrary collection of explosions and machismo posturing and frat boy assholery.” – David Cornelius, eFilmCritic “If it sou ... " [More]

In Bruges

In Bruges
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"In Fucking Bruges!?! My wife has been there, and that is the only reason I know it is in Belgium. The movie garnered a fist full of ‘Best Screenplay‘ nominations, including an Oscar nod. And it is… both set in Belgium and well written. We get the gist pretty quick, two Brit mob killers are sent to cool their heels in Bruges after a hit goes awry. One is an older sensible fellow, the other the brash young one who was obviously responsible for whatever the cock-up was. The odd couple pairing could play like every other incarnation… Oh, the sensible one likes culture and the oafish one doesn’t. The traditional formula is quite simple. Circumstances force opposing personalities together. They clash in humorous ways until a challenge appears for both of them. By embracing their differences, they overcome and gain a great appreciation for each other. For ‘In Bruges “>In Bruges‘, you might as well stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, because that isn’t the gig. Somehow, through the cunn ... " [More]

Into the Wild

Double Feature - The Rugged Ind ...
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"We went to the woods. Down the National Park road the direction Yogi told us. There was supposed to be a helipad there. The flat rock outcropping would suffice. We climbed up and smoked a bowl at sunset. Thousands of feet below a river ran. Its motion making static the vast forest in front of us. Next to the table-top flat stone was a fire ring that looked as if it had been recently used. We were not the first to rest here at dusk. As the darkness rose from the forest floor up to the stars we decided to head back. Instead of following the road, we would follow romance and the rugged path through the uncharted woods. Just in case, we kept an eye on the road to make certain we would not end up lost, stoned hikers. 20 paces further and the road had disappeared. For a split second we were there… primal purity. The search for that sensation drives the main characters in both of the films in this double feature, the titular Jeremiah Johnson and Chris McCandless of Into the Wild. Jeremi ... " [More]

Star Trek

More Star Trek!
By hautecritique in The Haute Critique on Spout
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"Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the franchise Star Trek; it’s continuing mission to seek out lucrative licensing opportunities. To blandly go where there has been a comfortable encampment for decades! To be honest, I didn’t hate the new Star Trek movie. It looked really pretty. There were some decent performances… It didn’t poison any significant memories of my childhood. And did I mention it was pretty? Oh, and hopefully it will stir the exploratory spirit of the movie-going world and fuel a resurgent space age, one which will carry a united humankind into it’s interplanetary adolescence. High hopes, I admit… But what Trek was to me, both TOS and TNG (to toss around Trekkie shorthand) was optimism. It was a positive furture created by and for sentient beings out of enlightened self-interest, intellectual curiosity and a genuine desire for the betterment of all peoples. A utopian future that looked hoplessly naive, but was the better for it. However, w ... " [More]