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.

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.

Damon’s character, the borderline schizophrenic compulsive serial liar Mark Whitacre  runs around giving the FBI all kinds of information about his company’s price fixing schemes.  Also he tells them all kinds of weird things that may or may not be true, which leaves the FBI thugs with mixed feelings.

During the whole movie, Whitacre is narrating the whole thing with his random wandering thoughts. It is a little weird at first as many of them have absolutely nothing to with the plotline or any of the characters in it.

Although without the inner narration the movie would be a lot more serious.  You are never sure what to believe, and you want to think that Whitacre is telling the truth.  Eventually you have to stop believing him completely or risk having him betray the trust that you need as an audience member.

Matt Damon did a very good job with the character and transforming into a part that would normally go to seasoned nervous paranoid schizophrenic acting master Nicolas Cage.  Damon took the roll and made it his own.  While Damon isn’t exactly type-casted as an actor, this role was outside of many of his previous flicks.  And he did a great job at it.

When the ten nominations arrive for best picture, don’t look for this one.  Although if the movie was released later in the year there is a chance that Damon would be able to get a best actor nomination.

I’ve never written a movie about traveling through time to kiss your wife or watch your dead mother sing in her opera performance, but I did watch one last week.  Not all time traveling movies are created equal.  There are so many little details and chronological cares that have to be done just right.

This movie does an okay job at that, there are still some questions, but none are incredibly jarring and offsetting.

Aside from some guy getting sucked through time every time he sneezes, the main character also has to deal with trying to keep his wife happy.

It’s not quite like he can use his traveling powers to great benefit here either.  He can’t choose when to go back in time to get out of arguments, he can’t zip back 15 minutes and put the seat down or run the vacuume.

What he can do however, is go back 30 years to when his wife was just 6 and start hitting on her before she knew what was going on.  That kind of creepyness just weirded me out.  And I know some creepy people.

There were a couple of loose ends in the movie, and the ending was very predictable and anticlimactic.  If you only see one time traveling, paradox creating, love empathy stiring movie this year, see “Star Trek“  If you decide you still have an hour and a half to kill and don’t mind paying $8 to have a weird flavor in your mouth, then see “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”

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.