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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Today it’s all about the movie ‘Love Actually’  If you haven’t seen it, but you have seen the movie ‘Crash’ then you really don’t need to watch this one.  Just make all of the story threads end on a festive Christmas happy note and it is essentially the same movie.

Although going from Love Actually to Crash is a little more difficult.  You have to replace Santa with a rapist and then replace the children’s Christmas pageant with kidnaping and decisions about if you want to sell a van full of people into slavery or not.  And add running over people, explosions, and massive amounts of racism.

Okay, so the comparison is only a one way street.  If you have seen Crash, you have seen Love Actually.  If you have seen Love Actually, you haven’t seen Crash unless you are really twisted and demented.  I’ll let you decide which one that is for yourself.

So the movie, the one in question (not the one that accidentally tripped and won Best Picture), is all about a bunch of people in their little lives going towards Christmas.  The people have some connection to one another, either by being second cousins to the Prime Minister or by being his brother in law’s secretary or perhaps by being his sister’s friend’s child who is in love with an American girl.  In case you couldn’t tell, the movie takes place in England.  Just like Crash…mostly.

There is one part of the movie where this guy falls in love with a Portuguese woman who speaks no English.  She is his maid while he works on his bad novel in the south of France.  She also falls in love with him, but he doesn’t really know it.  Also he doesn’t know a lick of Portuguese.  Really who does?  They talk, but they have no idea wtf the other is saying.

Soon after he leaves he gets sad and decides it would be a good idea to go marry her.  He runs off to do so, stopping only to take a two week course on Portuguese.  When he finally finds her, she is working as a waitress in a restaurant.  He impresses her by asking to be married and confessing his love in broken bits and pieces of Portuguese that he scrambled together.

Then comes the real tear jerker.  Knowing it ahead of time by reading the rest of this paragraph won’t even take away it’s potency.  She responds to him in English.  The grammar is messy and not structured, but it is in English.  She had been studying his language for the exact reason he was learning hers.

It reminds me of the Christmas story where the guy sells his pocket-watch to buy his wife a sweet comb.  Then she runs off and gets her hair made into a wig so she can buy a chain for his pocket-watch.  Both of the two sacrificed something they cherished for the one they love.  In the pocket-watch and hair story it turns out to suck for both of them.  But in Love Actually, it turns out to be very beautiful.

Some of the other stories that go along with the movie are also pretty good too.  There are about six storylines in total running through the movie.  One turns out to be a real downer.  Another illustrates how sad and lonely one guy is.  Another is neutral, like eating a sandwich.  But the remaining three are happy and heartwarming.

Hate to say it, but I liked this movie.  So I suppose that makes it nothing like Crash.

I watched it.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll tell you what it is about.  It’s about this good ‘ol boy Charles Farmer who wants to become a spaceman.  He is pretty pumped up about being in the airforce and NASA when he is young, but he quit that because life was hard.  Also his dad had shot himself, but mostly because life was hard.

It often is for quitters.

So Farmer decides that the best way to keep his dreams rolling is to build a rocketship in his barn and then blast himself off into space.  His twelve year old son who he would actually name Shepard, as in Shepard Farmer, is commanding the laptop-slash-”mission control”.

Farmer decides that his dreams are so important that it doesn’t matter what happens to his family.  I’m sure he would have sold off his wife and kids if it meant he could sit in his little tin can somewhere off in space.  He literally risks the farm to buy more rocket-ship parts.  The ranch is almost foreclosed.  His wife gets mad.

It really sucks if you saw the preview for this movie.  Knowing that everything is going to work and he goes to space safely makes everything kind of… pointless.  You just waste time waiting for the movie to progress far enough to see it.

The movie would have helped if there was a little conflict between Farmer and Shepard.  Just a little something to liven it up.  Farmer’s family eats up all of the lines about space travel.  They let him blow all of the money buying aluminum and fuel and weird crap.  They support him 100% and do not question him at all.  Other than the 30 second scene where the wife finds out they have no money and quickly forgives and forgets.

A disagreement between the son and Farmer would have helped to make the characters a little more real.  Sure the boy’s dad was his hero and all, but still a little thinking on his part would have been nice.

I can’t really harp to much more on Farmer, because everyone wants to go to space.  Furthermore every dork who has ever build a model rocket has thought about making one that will launch a person.

My friend and I had an elaborate plan to build rockets.  They would start out small, but would progress larger and larger and with more advanced payloads.  First we were going to launch an egg.  When we mastered that we would launch a mouse.  When we mastered that we would launch a person.  There was talk about sending a dog after the mouse, but we didn’t have the money to buy a dog (or however many dogs it would take) for the cause.  I’m not sure how we planned to afford a human launch if we couldn’t afford a $50 crossbred mutt.

We never made it to the egg launch, the rocket that we made to do that was so crappy that it pretty much killed our dreams right on the spot.  There was no way it would even hold together until we got to the launchpad.  It could hardly even hold together on the kitchen table.

Farmer could have certainly taken the advice of a couple 10 year olds, let the dream die.

The couple bits that I did see were interesting.  Not enough that I had to rush out and watch it, rather rush back in the house and watch it, but still it did look like it would be worth checking out.

The basic premise of the movie is Ned Devine wins the space lottery for a million space bucks, but the shock of winning gives him a fatal heart attack.  It is hard to cash in your ticket when you are no longer alive, so two of Ned’s friends decide to cash it in for him.  They justify it by reasoning, “It’s what Ned would have wanted.”

The tricky part is that Ned signed the back of the ticket before winning.  This means that only Ned could cash in the ticket.  This is where the movie begins to really pick up as the friends decide that they could simply have one of them claim to be Ned and cash the ticket.

What they don’t know is that for a ticket this size, an official from the lottery comes down to interview the winner and check everything out.  This is where things start to get really dicey as the duo tries to keep up the charade only to learn that more of the townsfolk might be needed to fool the inspector. (Don’t worry about spoilers, it says that much on the back of the box!)

I really liked this movie.  I was worried that it would only be a so-so movie, but it turned out to be great.

There was an additional love story in the movie that didn’t have a whole lot to do with the actual plot.  It was between a pig farmer who allegedly smells really bad despite all the soaps everyone keeps giving him and the mother of his son.

She doesn’t want anything to do with him because he always smells like a pigfarmer.  I imagine that is pretty gross and all, but she’s pretty shallow about it.  At the end of the movie he puts the girl’s father in charge of the pigfarm, takes a shower, and gets the girl.

How romantic.

If you haven’t seen the movie Waking Ned Devine, I would recommend adding it to your netflix queue.  It’s more fun than it looks to be.

‘To Ned Devine, may we forever be in your debt.’