The Secret Stand Up of Alex Mac

I am hard pressed to write something more than  "This Sucks".  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is not completely unentertaining. The problem is that  the movie is so unpolished that it is hard to see through the layers of grime to figure out where any of the shiny spots might be. Expectations should not be too high. After all we are dealing with the same Michael Bay, high budget, explosion-thon that we are accustom to by now. Which should not be enough to damn a movie given that it has a sufficiently interesting story and invested actors. Take, for instance, Bay's work on The Rock.

Transformers main problem is that the plot cannot decide what it wants. At one minute, Shia LeBeouf and Megan Fox are arguing about their love life and within 2 minutes, they love each other again. At one moment, the government is crippled by the bureaucratic fingers of a boorish Senator and in the next, it would seem that it is standard protocol to flout all orders as each and every soldier ignores the President's directives. Indeed, the movie sets up mini conflicts for a couple of minutes before resolving them with little fanfare, moving on the the next action piece without batting an eye. The main conflict (stop bad guys before they turn on sun-blowy-upper-gun) is resolved with a two minute fight thanks to plot-device ex machina. Granted, before that plot device, we are treated to 30-40 minutes of the loudest, most drawn out Pyrrhic battle in the history of ever but that means nothing because there is no tension. The film drags out the moments of tension far too long, with the only exception being an amazingly epic battle between Optimus Prime and about every other Decepticon left on Earth. That was actually really cool.

Everything else is trite. The acting isn't worth commenting because there really isn't any. LeBeouf manages to give some type of force gravitas to his character but it is misplaced on a downright absurd and confusing story. This may be simple Hollywood fare but other movies this summer have  pull it off much better.

Bottom Line: This movie makes no sense. Cool looking but fucking unintelligible. What more can I say?

It is one thing to laugh yourself breathless. It is a whole different thing to laugh yourself breathless in a theater while a dozen friends and countless strangers do likewise. The Hangover delivers this experience with waves and waves of controlled chaos that will leave audiences' lungs aflame. Okay, maybe I am being too poetic here but the fact of the matter is this: The Hangover is funny. Like, sidesplittingly funny. I havn't heard an audience so involved and expressive while watching a film since Snakes on a Plane. The film is filled with so many unexpected moment, so many crazy scenarios and outlandish moments that pile on top of each other with such speed that it is down right absurd.

The story? When soon to be married Doug (played by an underutilized Justin Bartha) and his friends Phil, Stu, and Alan (played by Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis respectively) run off to Las Vegas for Doug's bacherlor party, they except a simple night of gambling, women, and booze. When they wake up the next day, unable to remember a thing OR find Doug, they set off on a search for their friend and for clue about what the hell happened. The result is a mixture of Asian gangsters, tigers, tasers, Mike Tyson, missing teeth, and a lone baby left in their apartment.

The most important thing to make this work are actors of the highest comedic quality and The Hangover is well served by Cooper, Helms, and Galifianakis who respond to each new hurdle with such aplomb that the whole movie would feel overly formulaic without them. However, the best of the three is undoubtedly Galifianakis. At first, I wondered if his odd sense of humor would translate well to the screen and I was glad to find that he was given some of the best lines of the film and that he delivers them with characteristic dry wit. That is not to discount the others in our herioc trio. Helms and Cooper round out this pack of Stooges. The three of them complementy each other so well and with such ease that we honestly believe they've been tossed into these crazy scenarios.

The Hangover's biggest flaw then is the fact that it relies mostly on the strengths of its actors. The structure of the plot is nothing groundbreaking or overly original. What makes it succeed is that ever actor in every part is able to bring their own personal touches to the role from Rob Riggle's loudmouth cop to Ken Jeong's oddly effeminate Asian man.

Summer's sleeper hit might have finally arrived.

Bottom Line: The Hangover is a comedy whirlwind that is fortified by a strong and funny cast and moment after moment of increasingly unbelievable anctics. It is not groundbreaking or genre defining but it doesn't need to be. It just need to be damn funny. It is. 

Terminator Salvation is something or a conundrum to me. By all indications, it was going to be a summer action flick. And that is what it was. At the same time, it has a legacy to live up to. Terminator 2 is not only one of the genre defining action movies, it was also a moderately complex examination of what makes human, well, human. That, and it was really cool. Seeing Christian Bale cast as John Connor in a gritty, war torn future seemed like it had a lot of potential. Trailers showed the film to have a really cool feel. And then, I heard that McG was directing. And then I heard the Christian Bale freak out. After I was finally done laughing about that whole escapade, I made my way to a local arthouse cinema run by Vichy Frenchmen to se the film. And by that I mean, I got together with some friends late at night and saw the movie at the cheapest place we could.

And we still didn't get our money's worth. Salvation is a convoluted mess which does not live up the potential that it had. After all, the premise is sound. Show us the fabled war against the Machines which the series had always been centered on. What follows is something far more complicated than it should be. The story centers on John Connor (Bale) as he struggles against SkyNet. Normally, this would be enough. Enter Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright, a death row inmate who donated his bosy to CyberDyne before the start of the war and awakens to find himself a cyborg. The meeting of these two men will drasticall shift the course of the war forever. This happens all while the Machines hunt down a young Kyle Rees (Anton Yelchin), the man who is destined to go back in time and become Connor's father. 

It is a lot worse than it sounds. Terminator is a clunky series on disjointed set pieces which never reall build to any suitable climax. There are a dw cool moments but they never really feel complete. Sure, the bike chase is cool to look at but it feels off for some reason that I cannot put my fingers on. Indeed, that is Salvation's biggest flaw. It has all the means to be something good and looks actually feels like a movie (which is more than can be said for Wolverine) but there seems to be no real purpose to the story other than to tell it. Themes are present but they are never presented. The cast is good enough, even if Bale overacts the part of Connor. Worthington conveys a decent sense of inner turmoil. But as the two main characters, you feel little empathy for them. You don't feel their humanity. The only one you do feel for is Yelchin's Reese, who struggles to survive in the crapsack world he is in. There is a wieght to Yelchin's performance that the other protagonists lack. I expect great things from this guy. I mean between this and Star Trek, he certainly stole the summer. Or at least a small part of it.

This, like so many other films this summer, is something of a missed oppourtunity. Even if the well you are drawing from hold the same old water, it doesn't mean you can still enjoy it. Many of summer's films so far have missed a chance to take something we know and make it new again. Make it interesting. Salvation could have done what Star Trek did but alas, failed painfully.