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.

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.

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.’

I have seen this movie once before, back when it was in theaters, so I knew about the twist that it contains.  (And if you keep reading, you’ll know it too!)

It was much harder to watch knowing that it was all a setup.  Everything was so painfully obvious, but if you weren’t looking for it like poor old Nicolas Cage then you will feel really duped. (Not quite as duped as his character though!)

This really is the roll that he can play well.  A neurotic weirdo with no self esteem and multiple crippling social disorders.

It is a good movie and Cage plays his part soo well!  I’m somewhat shocked that he was looked over completly for any awards for the part.

The movie is great.  It is hard to watch twice.  Unless you are completly devoid of emotions and empathy and really like to watch people get suckered and stomped on.  Then you can laugh at Roy all you want as his heart is torn out in slow motion.

This movie is really neat, but it is  a Quintin Tarantino flick, so you know that it is goofy, gorey, and just plain screwed up.  There are some parts of the film that he must have done soley for the purpose of reminding you who directed it.  I can honestly say that I think this is his best movie so far.

Beware the Jew Hunter

This is one of those movies that needs to be seen in the theaters.  There are so many powerful moments that will be lost on your tiny tv or computer screen.

This movie has and endless supply of quotable one liners.  As fun as it is to run around ratteling them off now, I’m sure that it will be very annoying when everybody and their dog starts in.  I suppose though, that’s why he makes his movies, so people can do exactly that!

The movie was very well cast.  Everyone played their parts well, especially Christopher Waltz, “The Jew Hunter.”  His performance was utterly fantastic.  He won some award, “Biggest Baddass at Cannes Film Festival” or something like that.  The award was actually best actor at Cannes.  Hopefully he won’t get skipped over when the Academy Awards nominations get passed around.

Honestly this is a hard movie to tackle here.  Not just because it is a Nazi movie, but it is a Nazi Tarantino film.  That is a seriousy double whammy to end all double whammies.  Just get out there and see this movie.

My history with Star Trek is quite limited. I have only seen a couple of episodes and one of the previous bad movies. Honestly there was not much that I found appealing about it. So I wasn’t to worked up to see the show. I was more than pleasantly surprised to by the time the opening credits appeared.

The opening scene was perhaps the best scene I have watched in a movie in a LONG time. It had huge explosions, ruthless attacks, emotionally gripping moments, great effects, and selfless acts of heroism. All of this happened before the opening credits.

Now I am a man. I am I manly man who does manly things like lift heavy rocks and does pushups. Even considering how manly I most certainly am, Star Trek made me want to cry. Just in the opening scene it made me gooshy.

The story was put together quite well. I’m sure that this will bring in a new band of followers. Some of them might actually become full blown Trekkies, complete with the funny starfleet uniforms.

Star Trek looked great, that is for sure. However ILM did the effects. George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic did a bunch of work on it’s longtime rival franchise’s new hit movie. That’s got to make some nerds mad and have Roddenberry rolling in his grave.

I am amused by Star Wars people making a great Star Trek movie. Especially considering the last three Star Wars movies.

No Klingon? How good could this movie actually be?

This is one you should check out. I really liked this movie. Star Trek exceeded my expectations by FAR!

As the name implies, X-Men Origins Wolverine is all about his early days as a lovable young mutant with slight rage issues, wicked chops, and a strange set of values and morals.

XMen Origins: Wolverine SNICK SNICK!

Wolverine IV wasn’t as good as Wolverine I. Which makes it not nearly as good as Wolverine II. I’m not quite sure how it compares to ‘Wolverine III: The Last Stand.’ I suppose it must have been better, considering that my eyes didn’t bleed in this one and aneurysms were kept to a minimum.

Admittedly my knowledge of comic books is quite limited. And if I tell you anything about anything, it’s clearly because I saw it in a movie. I am a total poser in this realm. Although I suppose posers pretend to care. I couldn’t care less about comic books. My knowledge on the subject can be easily surpassed by glancing over a page or two of Wikipedia.

That said, Wolverine is the next James Bond.

People care about the little guy. He doesn’t know who he is and he’s really mad about it. In Wolverine IV, you get to find out all about his past. To bad he won’t remember any of it.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Wolverine as a musical. These guys did a great job with this bit.

Go see the movie. It’s not the greatest Xmen movie, but it’s not a bad one.

Australia directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman

The epic feel good movie of they year… Well, that might not be exactly true, but it certainly was a great movie.  I hope it does well in the theaters. This movie deserves it.The movie is about a gal who goes down to Australia to get a little cattle outpost ‘Faraway Downs’ sold off.  Of course she finds corruption and tries to stamp it out along the way.  In doing so, she isolates her little community and is now stuck with a huge herd of cattle that are hundreds of miles from Darwin.  The town on to the north that needs cattle to feed the troops going into WWII.

She finds Hugh Jackman, and convinces his character to be the master drover and have one heck of a cattle drive.  As expected, they drink and kiss each other.  Ick!

At the town of Darwin, there is one hell of a bombing.  Japan decided that their little stunt at Pearl Harbor wasn’t good enough, so the fleet moves south and decimates this little one horse town.

In the interest of letting you watch the movie for yourself I won’t talk very much more about the details.

While the film was a big epic romance/adventure/drama/action/coming of age story, it didn’t take itself so seriously as I had expected.  There wasn’t needless drama just for the sake of having tension and the movie almost seemed to mock those moments.  But when the drama was needed, it certainly pulled it’s own weight.  In these respects I think it can be compared to ‘Gone With the Wind.’

Another similarity the two movies have is the effective use of swearing.  While most movies today curse left and right Australia refrained from any swearing until a very emotionally charged and appropriate moment.  It was nice to see it used for emphasis, rather than part of a regular vocabulary.

At points the cinematography was a little jarring as the camera moved around in unusual patterns, but once getting used to the style it really adds a unique feel to the flick.

But with all of that, the question still remains… Who is the real king?  King Carne or King George?