The movie Searching for Bobby Fischer came out in 1993. Up until a couple weeks ago, I was didn’t know there were any movies focused on chess.  More specifically I was unaware there were any GOOD movies about chess.  I’m sure there are  a ton of bad movies revolving around the game or featuring it in some prominent way.

The story follows a young Josh Waitzkin (Played by Max Pomeranc) as he learns that baseball is boring and chess is where it’s at.  It also helps that Josh is some kind of super child chess prodigy.  His dad is very excited about being overbearing and forcing him into chess tournaments and chess academy training.

The teacher from the chess academy, Bruce, is a real stick in the mud high-horser who takes the fun out of playing.  While it makes Josh a better player, it nearly breaks him.  Fortunately Josh has been taught kung-fu street chess by Morpheus Laurence Fishburne’s character Vinnie.

The mix of highbrow classical chess and the in-your-face street chess are constantly at odds throughout the whole movie.  But in the end, they work together to help Josh bowl through his ongoing rival’s moves.  His rival reminds me of the kid from the movie ‘Wizard’ with the Nintendo Powerglove, a total pa-toot.

Long story short, this was a decent movie, much better than the title makes it sound.   I wouldn’t rush out to watch it unless you are a huge chess fan or like child prodigy stories, but I would add it to your queue.

The last movie that I have gone out to see is the new version of ‘True Grit’.  I have only seen part of the original version, and that was when I was around 9 years old.  My family had rented it for my grandpa to watch one day.  He was happy to watch the movie as it was one of his favorites.  I didn’t have an attention span then (not sure if I do now either) and went off to play with the Cowboys and Indians toys they had.

Because of the nostalgia from the idea of the old movie (that I hadn’t seen), I was not excited to see the new version that ruined the memories.  What if I didn’t like the movie or what if they did a bad job?  My better half on the other hand was thrilled to go.

In short, the movie was awesome!  I really liked the characters and the progression.  After seeing True Grit I tried to find a copy of the old version for comparison.  It turns out that a remake of an old movie spawns a lot of people with the same idea.  All of the rental stores had it checked out, netflix didn’t have it on demand, and it wasn’t carried in the box stores.

While I stopped short of handing over $20 to buy it online, I did run into an old 5 minute teaser video on it.  Most of the lines were taken verbatim and it looks like the new version was very true to the older one. 

Of course being made by the Coen brothers, they had a lot of blood splats and went all out developing characters.  The ending of true grit was a big let down.  Showing Mattie as an old woman and having Rooster become a circus performer added nothing to the movie and killed the emotional bond between them and the audience.  Other than the lackluster ending, the show was fantastic.

Damon & Bridges did well playing characters outside of their usual or signature roles.

It has taken a hundred years, but Pixar has released Toy Story 3 into the world.  I guess they wanted to finish their good movies before going back to the well to dredge up more of the same thing.

This movie was a cross between ‘a predictable boring story’ and ‘a waste of time.’  Pixar made no secret that the film was about what happens to toys when you go off to college.  They are stuffed in the attic, the garbage, or the goodwill box.  Sure it’s sad and nostalgic to dispose of all your old trash and I’m sure if you were an atomic living toy it would be even more depressing.  Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying “I can’t enjoy Futurama because one of the main characters is a cyclops” and I’m also not saying “I can’t enjoy Toy Story because Toys are inanimate objects.”  I can and will buy into the world that any film maker wants to force feed me. (That might be a lie)

The problem is the progression of the film is crystal clear.  You know exactly where the film will be taking you five minutes from now.  Then it takes ten minutes getting there.  The closest thing to an unforeseen event was when the pizza planet aliens came down with the claw.  Is that really hard to imagine happening?

After producing the film the three little pigs in 1933, Walt Disney was pressured to make a sequel due to the success of it.  Walt new that you wouldn’t be able to impress the public to the same level with the same thing.  To quote him on the topic, “You can’t top pigs with pigs.”

That’s exactly what Pixar is trying to do here.

Clearly I should be writing my reviews closer to when I actually watch the movie in question.  I was much more upset at the movie when it was fresh in my mind.

It was cool to see the Totoro in the film.

How should you train a dragon?  Apparently you shoot it down from the sky into a crater.  Then you feed it fish until it likes you.  As long as you don’t get eaten that is.

This movie is the latest flick from Dreamworks Animation and it was one that made me say, “Okay I’m buying that when it comes out on DVD!”  This statement is usually reserved for films from studios with names like ‘Pixar’ and ‘Universal’.

It’s weird, these dreamwork folks.  Their movies are either hit or miss.  It’s almost as if there are two different studios working to crank out the 3D animated films.  One half produces Kung Fu Panda, Chicken Run and How to Train your dragon, while the other half is silently cranking out films like Monsters Vs Aliens, Shark Tale, and Over the Hedge.  It doesn’t look like there is an end in sight either if ‘Over the Hedge’ can return over three times the $100,000,000 spent to make it.

Now this has little to do with the actual film of Vikings and Dragons, so I’ll get back to that.  Here is the basic synopsis of the movie…

“A Viking teenager named Hiccup lives on the island of Berk, where fighting dragons is a way of life. The teen’s smarts and offbeat sense of humor don’t sit too well with his tribe or its chief… who just happens to be Hiccup’s father. However, when Hiccup is included in Dragon Training with the other Viking teens, he sees his chance to prove he has what it takes to be a fighter. But when he encounters (and ultimately befriends) an injured dragon, his world is flipped upside down, and what started out as Hiccup’s one shot to prove himself turns into an opportunity to set a new course for the future of the entire tribe.”

This movie is great!  It did have me wondering at points where exactly the audience was being led.  At times I was having a little trouble trying to figure out where the movie was taking me as the story’s twists and hooks kept darting around my expectations.

This movie is a lot of fun.  The author Cressida Cowell has apparently created a whole slew of books featuring hiccup.  It looks like I’ve got a couple to pickup!

There was one character who kept giving stats of different dragons including type of breath weapon, range, and movement speed.  Clearly it was making fun of Dungeons and Dragons, but it could make a neat world setting for a simple role playing system.  They did keep referencing a book with all of the dragons and their powers.  Being curious about this, I did a google search for ‘How to Train Your Dragon RPG’  It looks like I wasn’t the only one to make this obvious connection.  Hopefully I won’t be coming across as dorky as some of the results I have found!

This is one to see on the big screen, you won’t be disappointed.

I just came across this short film called ‘Validation’ and I’m sure you are going to love it. It came out a couple years ago, but somehow it slipped by me. I haven’t liked a short film this much since 7:35 de la mañana corto.  Both are great shorts, so check them out!

I finally had the chance to see Avatar.  I was turned away from the theater twice due to sold out shows for the entire day, but I finally got a ticket and marched in with my popcorn bucket in hand and wife in tow.  Reports of varying reliability repeatedly told me that: 1) I have to see this movie 2) I have to see it in theaters and 3) You have to see in with funny 3D glasses on.

With such a large variety of folks telling me to watch it and stressing to see it in 3D, I decided to go big and get all the theater up charges I could find.  So I went out and saw Avatar in 3D on an Imax screen.  That is why it was sold out for the whole day the first two times I went to see it.  Even when I went an hour early for the first show of the day, the showing was sold out.  This time not for the day though and my wife and I got our tickets and had a four hour wait.  We went home and ate sandwiches or something stupid like that.

Then off to the movie theater we drove.  Cutting it a little close I sent her in to pick out the seats and I went to snag the stale popcorn with cold butter flavored oils.  Thank god for previews!

I get in to find the place jam packed and no sign of girl anywhere.  Eyes adjust to the darkness and there she is, best seats in the house.  Well, best seats in the house is where I was looking for her.  Where we actually ended up sitting was closer to the front than ideal.  Our seats were so close that the 3d effects weren’t as spectacular as I imagine they would be without them.  That part was somewhat of a downer.

Oh and even worse, the movie had already started.  Apparently there aren’t quite as many previews on Imax size screens.  Good thing there was about half an hour of exposition at the beginning of the movie.  But of course that brings me to the movie itself.

Avatar…

Avatar is about a guy who is linked up to a smurf body and goes to live in the forest with the gentile smurfs.  He works hard to learn their smurf ways and is eventually accepted into the smurf village.  It is inevitable that he falls in love with Smurfette.  Oh wait, that is Cartman in ‘Dances with Smurfs‘

James Cameron’s use of CGI has certainly improved since the iceberg in Titanic that looked like a four year old drew a blob of jello.  Now he has got us in the magical world of Naboo Pandora where mountains can float and cockraoch-zombie-dogs can run free.

Before I go any further, I will say this movie is dumb.  The story is very formula and predictable every step of the way.  Aside from that, if you can ignore the fact that you can see everything happening beforehand, it is a neat movie with some different ideas.

The alien world was really pretty.  And it was actually an alien world with it’s own rules, flora, and fauna.  Animals and plants behaved differently from everything on Earth.  So that was cool and fun.

One thing that was super gross was the way they communicated with animals.  All the little phalanges coming out of the tentacles and braiding together was gross!  Did anybody else squirm just a little every time?  And I would have liked to see a little more to show the connection between the two.  Even if it is just a suction-cup noise.  Something to illustrate their brains are synced up.

Then there were the points where they kept on yanking people out of the matrix buy slamming on the big red button conveniently placed right by the cyro-tube (or whatever you call it).  Boy that really made me mad each time it happened.  Why would they place that there?  Don’t they know you can kill a person if their mind isn’t ready to exit the matrix just yet?

That bothered me more than it should have.  Yes this movie world has it’s own rules and structures that are separate from other ones, but still!  Didn’t they see the part in the Matrix where Cypher was dropping the freedom fighters like flies?

Speaking of concepts that were stolen from the Matrix. (Although I don’t know if it counts because you need to discount the sequels out of existence to maintain your sanity!) What is the deal with the robot suits?  No kidding, if they life way off in the future should we honestly believe that a clunky robot limited to the strength of a slow clumsy human is the best technology has to offer?

Even if I could forgive having a humanoid battle robot with no weapons built on,  I still don’t know what the deal was with the robot kung-fu action.  Those robots were to clunky for MY future invasions of foreign planets ruled by tribal smurfs.

Let me see what I’ve got next on my list for this movie… Dances with smurfs, check.  Pretty alien world, check.  Gross tentacle connections, check.  Pulling each other out of the matrix, check. Stupid robots, check.  I know I’m missing something stupid from the movie.  Oh yea, the reason humans were there.

Humans were waging war in order to get something they actually called “Unobtainium.”  At this point I’m really wondering what the hell is wrong with the world.  That is seriously worse than George Lucas letting his kids name alien species in the newer star wars films.

How much thought did it really take to come up with that name?  And what were the rejects? “Cantfindium?” I could come up with more, but I think I have already done more brainstorming on the topic than James Cameron and others who helped write this thing.

Well that just about wraps up this session.  Just a recommendation left to give.  Should you see this movie?  Okay sure, but only with the funny 3D glasses.  If you can’t get to a 3D theater, then wait until you can rent the movie on dvd.

*Also when the big bulldozers rolled up, my wife apparently wasn’t the only one who immediately thought of Fern Gully

After a push from John Lasseter to get back to traditional animation, Disney has now released a new movie done in the traditional cell animation style.  Sure the studio used computers, but rather than being modeled and rendered in 3D software this movie has the traditional organic animation style to it.  If you haven’t seen this movie yet, then go.  It would be a good idea to bring a date.  She will love it.

The story goes mostly to the style of the classic princess fairytale storyline.  Not the fairytale of ‘The Frog Prince’ it does steer away and add some cool twists to that fable.  The classic princess and prince formula that was once the key to movies from Disney studios.

The girl who is called the princess actually isn’t a princess, but rather a hardworking girl from a poorer section of New Orleans.  The movie takes place in roughly the 20′s when people still liked jazz music.  Her main objective throughout the movie is to open a restaurant and make her dad proud.  So in order to do this she saves pennies, nickels, dimes, and dollar bills in jars.

Over the period of about 10 years she has just as many jars filled.  This is while working double shifts and not spending time or money on anything.  Why she didn’t convert her coins to cash is beyond me.  A couple of dollar bills stacked up would have taken a lot less space in her sock drawer.

When she gets closer to making her dream come true she gets transmogified into a frog.  Ouch!  There goes that dream!  But she doesn’t let her lack of humanity stand in the way, as she skips through the swamp collecting characters like Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz.

The animation on this movie is great.  It looks terrific.  The multiplane camera work was there.  The movements were believable.  This movie could have come out in the 40′s or 50′s when Disney was at it’s princess movie peak and it would fit right in.  I don’t claim to know anything about possible effects of the racial tensions of the time, so I am speaking solely of the look and style of the movie’s animation.  That and how clean and seamless the animation is would simply blow minds away.

Back to the story, one thing that is noteworthy is that the villian didn’t actually have any powers.  Spooky voodoo had powers and he could control them somewhat, but it put him in serious debt to the underworld.  The shadowman was a pupet, even if he didn’t believe it himself.  He was controlled by the man.  Then again, who isn’t?

There were quite a few references to the days of disney gone by.  My personal favorite was “The Firefly Five Plus Lou.’  Back in the heyday of Disney animation, a number of Walt’s 12 old men (his key animators) had a jazz group called “The Firehouse Five Plus Two.’  I was watching this movie and thinking about how much Walt would have liked it and how well it was made, but when that omage showed up, tears actually started down my face.  What a great way to honor these men.

Of course that was the big happy grand fanalie, so crying at that point made me look very out of touch with reality.  Just a few minutes before there was a really emotional part of the movie where an important character is on his deathbead.  Everyone else in the theater is sad and mopey, but I’m sitting there munching on popcorn.

With that, see this movie.  It is a princess movie.  It is a cartoon.  It is beautifuly.  Find an excuse to go see it.  Tell your friends you’re going to see Avatar again.  Then go see this movie.