Top 20 movies revisited

Okay, back in November, I published a list of my top 20 favorite movies of all time and while I would never say that I didn't like the movies I listed, I would say that I have done a bit of fine-tuning in the time between then and now. Having said that, these are my new top 20 favorite movies of all time. The list is largely unchanged, but there have been some movies that I have seen lately that I have really enjoyed and appreciated. Some of them I have even written reviews for on this blog, so it won't really come as a shock to anyone when they see it on here. Others, I'm just kind of ashamed that I never considered them when I was first putting the list together. Anyway, without more ado, here are my revised top 20 favorite movies

1.     Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)
2.     Godfather’s 1 and 2 (Francis Ford Coppola)
3.     Saving Private Ryan (Stephen Spielberg)
4.     The Dark Knight/ Inception/ Memento (Christopher Nolan)
5.     Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme)
6.     Lord of the Rings (all of them) (Peter Jackson)
7.     Mystic River (Clint Eastwood)
8.     Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick)
9.     Fight Club (David Fincher)
10. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
11. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton)
12. Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton)
13. Scarface (Brian De Palma)
14. Bladerunner (Ridley Scott)
15. Braveheart (Mel Gibson)
16. Star Wars 4-6 (George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Richard Marquand)
17. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick)
18. The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard/ Joss Whedon)
19. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson)
20. Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes)

Coriolanus: Voldemort does Shakespeare

If you remember last year, I had at one point made a list of the movies that I was most looking forward to in the year 2012. One of them was a movie that came out a little while ago, but I had not a chance to see it until this morning, much to my displeasure. That movie is called Coriolanus, which is the directorial debut of Ralph Fiennes (who also stars in it), better known to the world as Voldemort. And before anybody asks, I have seen the movie now and I can confirm that Fiennes does in fact... have a nose. But onto the important stuff. For those of you who are unaware, I am not a huge fan of the director Baz Lurhman. What does that have anything to do with this movie? Well, Lurhman is, in my opinion, a guy who values style over substance. He tries to show that he values both, but the style part always prevails in my opinion. A perfect example of this is his film Romeo + Juliet. While I do admire his effort and intentions to bring Shakespeare's work to a younger audience who wouldn't have otherwise taken a look, I think his execution was slightly off. For one thing, casting Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio as the main characters, while I don't blame him... Well, he could have done better. The idea of taking Shakespeare's words and puting them into a modern setting is a clever and challenging trick, though not impossible. The problem that I have with Baz's version is that the people speaking the words make it feel out of place. It's just teenagers and New Yorkers speaking them, and as much as I respect the cast, including Paul Sorvino, I couldn't get used to them talking like that. Take that compared to Ralph Fiennes' adaptation of Coriolanus, which is again, taking Bill's words and applying them to a modern setting. Again, I will say that it took me a while to get used to such an old dialect being heard in this kind of setting, but the main difference was the cast. While R+J was all teens and New Yorkers, Coriolanus was all classically trained actors who all got their start in theater, some of them doing Shakespeare even. Ralph Fiennes even acted in this play when he was getting started. The rest of the cast includes Gerard Butler, Jessica Chastain, Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox. To them, this is nothing new, and again, while it feels a little out of place, the actors still do a good job of making it sound natural. The acception is Gerard Butler, who has mostly done action films like 300, but I think he is like Liam Neeson, he can do more dramatic roles, but all we want to see him in is action movies. Here, Butler really proves his dramatic talent. Being that this movie didn't get a very wide release in theaters, I won't be surprised if it gets overlooked come awards season, which is a real shame, because this really is a well made movie that gives Bill all the respect his work deserves. This movie deserves to be put in the same league as Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, which has become the definitive Shakespeare movie.

Final Grade: A+

Johnny Depp and Tim Burton

Before I get started, I acknowledge that the movie Dark Shadows was based off of a show that had much more of a darker and more serious tone than this movie. I would also like to say that I never watched the show and know next to nothing about it. Having said that, I would like to say something to all of the naysayers who keep bashing this movie strictly for that: I DON'T CARE. In the same way I actually liked the latest Star Trek and Get Smart movies even though it strayed away from their source material at times. I never watched the shows or any of the previous movies, so I could really care less how well they hold up. As an action movie and as a comedy, I thought they were good. Dude, when are people going to make a show off of something I grew up with? Oh wait, that's right, they're making Battleship. Be careful what you wish for I guess. But I digress, now that I have gotten that part out of the way, let's move on.

Something you should know about me is that I am a huge Tim Burton fan, and I am one of those people who actually like the pairing of him and Johnny Depp. I know a number of people are thinking that this act is starting to get stale, but I still get a kick out of them from time to time. The thing about Burton's movies is that even if I think the story sucks, I can still find something worth enjoying about it. An example of two Tim Burton movies that I legitimately enjoy as a whole would have to be Sweeney Todd and Edward Scissorhands, both of which actually rank amongst my favorite movies of all time. The visual style is great, they both have great stories, and with Sweeney Todd, I just love the fact that they stuck with keeping it a musical. Now a movie that I like for some reasons and not for others is Alice in Wonderland. I know a lot of people consider that to be his biggest failure, and even I have to admit that it mostly sucks, but there are still parts about it that I enjoy. The characters are crazy the way they are in the book, and the way Burton imagined Wonderland being like from a visual standpoint was actually very similar to the way I imagined it when I read the story in English class the year before. I guess you could say that in some cases, Tim Burton is a visual artist before he is a film maker, because I felt the same way about his version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I'm not saying that his version is better than the one with Dr. Frodrick Frankenstein, but there are areas that I think are improvements. For example, the way the factory looked in his version was a lot more like the way I imagined it in the book. I was read the original novel when I was young, and when I imagined the way the factory would be, and I saw the movie from the 70's, I thought it was a little underwhelming. Okay, I get that this was a long time ago and they didn't have the technology that they have today, but I like seeing the extra steps that Burton was able to take in order to create his vision for Wonka's factory. Having said that, I don't even really like to compare the versions of Roald Dahl's classic because I like both of them in their own unique way.

Okay, so you are probably wondering what I thought of their latest collaboration, Dark Shadows. Well, to be honest, if I had to rank this movie on a scale of Tim Burton movies, I would put this one right in the middle. If Edward Scissorhands and Sweeney are at the top and Alice in Wonderland is at the bottom, this would go right next to Sleepy Hollow. I definitely enjoyed it and laughed at a number of parts, but there were other areas that I though were a little meh. Overall, if you are a Burton fan in the sense that I am, you will enjoy it. As for everybody else, I can't make any guarantees seeing as how you are all fair game.

THE AVENGERS

Do you really have to ask?

THIS MOVIE WAS AWESOME!!! Let's face it, in the past decade, we've had a lot of movies that we got our hopes up for, and they turned out to suck. With The Avengers, this is not the case, the movie lives up to every bit of hype that has been created for this movie since Iron Man came out. I'll be honest, when Nick Fury said "I'm here to talk about the Avengers Initiative", I thought it was going to be one of those movies that would ultimately fail to come to fluition. I always imagined the studio coming up with an excuse like "We couldn't find a director, the cast wasn't able to come together, it was just getting too expensive". But there was a moment when the movie started where I seriously asked myself "Wait a minute... Am I seriously watching The Avengers?"

Do I even need to talk about the story? Well no, being that this is a blog and not a book report, but I guess I'll talk about it a little. The exiled demigod Loki has come to earth in hopes of finding the cosmic cube (the blue cube thing from Captain America). There was another name for the cosmic cube, but it's hard to spell, and I'm running on 3 hours of sleep, so I won't even try. Along the way, Loki has befriended a race of aliens, whose name is also hard to spell (give me a break, I went to the midnight showing and am now writing this at 7:30 the next morning), who have said that they will help him conquer earth if they can get their hands on the cube. Following Loki's arrival, Nick Fury calls in the heroes that we've spent the past 5 movies developing and getting to know, and I'm not going to list them here. Not because their names are hard to spell, but because if you really don't know who they are, I would invite you to kiss it. And that's about as much of the story as I am willing to divulge here. I know that I tend to be unapologetic when it comes to spoilers, but I have to make exceptions because I really want you guys to see this movie. The action is awesome, and Joss Whedon's script has quite a few (intentionally) funny moments involving the interactions between these characters. I would say that the best parts are when these characters are just working off of each other, both in fights and in witty exchanges. I would say that the best moment (in my own opinion) would be the part where they are finally standing as one huge group and the camera pans around them as you see them prepare for the fight thats about to come (it was in the last trailer). What were my other favorite moments? Well, pretty much any scene with Iron Man, because let's face it, Robert Downey Jr has enough swag that he alone could have saved the earth.

Final Grade: A++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

P.S- Stay until the end of the credits!

My Disgust for Battleshit

I'm just going to come out and say it, I may have not seen Battleship yet, but I can already tell you, it is going to suck hard. You know why? Because it is supposedly based off of the game Battleship, one of my favorite games to play as a child, and yet is has about jackshit to do with Battleship! Why the fuck does it have aliens in it? Why is Rihanna in it? Were Jada Pinkett Smith and Kerry Washington too classy for you guys? What about her screams "MOVIE GOLD" to you? Shit, what about her screams "I'M WORTHY OF LIVING"?! She fucking sucks! She has one good song, and even then, she's just singing the chorus while Jay-Z and Kanye are doing the verses. And why does she play the person that says "My shaman used to talk about these guys"? You've already sunk your movie just by having her in it, and now you're going with THIS cliche? Why does a girl who sounds like she's from LA talk like this? Also, what is with that effect of having a bunch of guys fly forward, then fly backward only to float forward again? Are the aliens just fucking around with them? Are they ADD or something? Why the fuck does this movie have aliens in it? Also, do you really have such little shame that you actually put a little asian kid staring in awe at the destruction? After that, I am convinced that some sort of Michael Bay demon seed had something to do with this script. Why the fuck does this movie have aliens in it? Why do they look like total rip-offs of the decepticons from Transformers? Don't lie to me! They totally do you fuckers! What do aliens have to do with Battleship? The idea behind the game is to guess what your opponent is going to do next with little to no information of their battle plan or positions. It was like a kid version of poker! Did you guys miss that part? Why the fuck does this movie have aliens in it? This would have been a lot better if you made it some sort of World War II thriller. Actually, they kind of already made that. It's called U-571! Okay, it's not exactly the same. It does take place on a submarine, but it does at least give you the tension of not knowing whether you'll get hit by the enemy when you have little to work with in terms of even knowing where they are. How does adding sci-fi make this a legitimate movie! Did you guys even play the game as a child? Fuck no you didn't you hacks! Look, I wouldn't have this problem if you just tried to find an original title, and drop kicked Rihanna out of this movie. Or better yet, make a few changes and turn this into the script for Transformers 4! I'm betting that's what it really was! I'm betting this started out as the script for Transformers 4, but then you found out that Michael Bay sucks balls because you have apparently been living under a rock since you guys saw The Rock, the only good Michael Bay movie in existence, thanks solely to Sean Connery, and decided to do something else. So you decided to rape the 80's and 90's yet again and slap the title Battleship on there. Oh yeah, good fucking job you hacks! What's next? A movie called Risk with aliens and it just takes place over the course of ONE day even though Risk was supposed to give you the feeling of commanding armies throughout an entire war? Being that you just did this to Battleship, I wouldn't be surprised. Why the fuck does this have aliens in it? Oh yeah, and if this battle supposedly takes place at sea, then why does a good chunk of the trailer take place on land? Why are these aliens attacking the ocean first rather than the major cities?! Whose bright idea was it to start the invasion in an area where there is nothing to invade? They have ships that can fly, why are they sitting in the middle of the ocean? I haven't even seen the movie and I'm pointing out the plot holes! Let's not even get me started on the biggest twist of the knife. Not only did you rape my favorite childhood past time, but you also had to throw Liam Neeson into the mix. What did they do to you Liam? Did they kidnap your daughter again? Yes, I said again, I think the sex slavers from Taken are behind this. They just kidnapped his daughter again and told him that they will make things easy on him and if he starred in this movie, they would let her go. Can't say I blame the guy, but you fuckers are just despicable! You know how it is a running joke that Sean Bean always dies in his movies? Well the exact same thing used to happen to Liam. In this case, I'm praying he dies early in the movie, that way he can get out with some dignity, even though his dignity has taken an arrow to the testicle. Everybody else can just rot. And why the fuck does this have aliens in it?

The Raven

TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? Because I sat through this POS of a movie! That's why! This movie really was a letdown, guys. I'm sorry to say it, but this really sucked. The best way I can describe it is to compare it to many of Poe's characters, mostly the narrator from The Tell Tale Heart and Usher from The Fall of the House of Usher. In both cases, they start out well, and then slowly decline into oblivion. And that is how I feel about this movie. The beginning was good, but over time, it just got worse and worse. The movie starts out with Edgar Allan Poe's death and then goes back to about a week earlier, claiming that the events leading to his death are forever a mystery... UNTIL NOW. You get the idea. The premise is that there is a serial killer loose in Baltimore who is killing people using techniques that have been described in Edgar Allan Poe's novels. And so a police constable (played by some dude who reminds me of an older, stone-faced Joseph Gordon Levitt) recruits Mr. Poe to help them predict the killer's next move. So far, the movie had me interested, it had an interesting story, it was interesting to see how the killer pulled off these amazing feats, and I was excited to see a movie about one of my favorite writers. The only real problem that I had so far was the casting of John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe. Don't get me wrong, Cusack is a fine actor, but in all of the movies I've seen him in, he has always been the normal everyday guy. Whenever we talked about Poe, I always imagined him being very eccentric and reserved, yet also very over the top in the way he spoke. Cusack was able to nail down the over the top speaking manner, but I never got the feeling that he was either reserved or eccentric. I wouldn't be surprised if they originally wanted someone like Edward Norton or Johnny Depp to play the part, but just couldn't get them, but if I had to make a list of people who could play Poe, Cusack would be far from the top of it.

The rest of the movie seemed okay until the end. There was another issue that I had with it as a whole, but we can get to that later. In the end, we have this big twist as to who the killer is, and it's some guy that only had one or two lines throughout the rest of the movie. And once we come to the scene where his identity is revealed, he just becomes silly, and his motivations are kind of retarded. Without giving to much away, his ultimate end game was he wanted Poe to crank out one last good story before he died, being that Poe was going though a bit of a dry spell in the final years of his life. Aren't there better ways of doing this? On top of that, I was really hoping for that scene (that's in every mystery movie like this) where it is explained how the killer was able to pull off all of this. We sort of had it in the movie Se7en where the detectives figure it out themselves, there were scenes like that in the most recent Sherlock Holmes movies, even in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, they explain what was going on, or they at least give you enough information so you can figure out the rest of it for yourself. And there was no scene like that in this movie. Whenever we saw the killer do something, I kept thinking to myself "There is either more than one of them, or this guy is going to have some sort of weird other-worldly abilities". And on top of that, the killer just acted goofy when he finally came out. He got this weird smile and this goofy evil laugh that were kind of reminiscent of Willem Dafoe when he played the Green Goblin, now that I think about it.

There is one other problem that I would be willing to look past if it hadn't been for the ending. And that is the tone and feel that this movie was going for. At the start, I got the feeling that they were going for a Se7en type feel. But then there was a point where I feel like they decided to go with something along the lines of the Sherlock Holmes movies. Neither one was very fitting, considering that this is too intense to have the fun feel of the Sherlock Holmes movies, and it's far too silly to be in the same league as Se7en. What they should have done is go for more of a Hammer Horror Films feel to it. Kind of try to give it an old-school feeling. A good example of what I mean would be that Sleepy Hollow movie that came out years back. That was a movie that took itself seriously, but was also aware of the fact that it was silly and the people that made it looked like they were having a blast doing just that, being seriously silly. At least that's what I think it was doing, considering that movie had Hammer written all over it, people aren't really sure what that movie was going for. But anyway, if they had taken that approach, this movie could have at least been enjoyable, but it took itself seriously and thought it was something that could be taken seriously. Sorry guys, it just doesn't work out that way. I could go on about all of the historical innacuracies and the other details that were never explained or explored leading to the events of Poe's demise. I could go on about the fact that they used all of Poe's lesser known stories rather than the ones that practically defined both the genre and his career and how, even though the title is The Raven, there is little mention of the original poem and how I was hoping that they could squeeze some of that story into this movie, but if I did, this review would never end.

Honestly, I was really hoping for them to just do a biopic about Poe. You would think that would have already happened, seeing as how he was one of the most influential writers of all time and was a very interesting (to say the least) person. You could do a character study diving into his psychology and exploring the life events that troubled him so much and how that may have had an influence on his work. Come on guys! Really? After making movies like The Aviator and J. Edgar, you would think something like that would be in the works already! Whatever, I'm not bitter.

Final Grade: C-

Carrie remake

Stephen King has had a rather interesting history with movies. When a movie is made based off of one of his books, it goes either one of two ways: It's either phenomenal, or it sucks hard. Some of you know that the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of The Shining is one of my favorite movies, even though it goes away from the subject material. For the most part, the rest of his adaptations tend to suck. The one exception is Carrie, which is a story about a sheltered high school girl who discovers that she has special abilities and uses it to exact her revenge after being pushed too far by her classmates. While Brian De Palma also tends to be hit and miss with me (love Scarface, hate The Untouchables), I will say that his version of Carrie is one of his better films. And now, with this constant stream of re imaginings and remakes coming out, it seems that a remake of Carrie has made the line up.

Being that this was one of the better Stephen King adaptations, I thought it was kind of odd that this would be the movie that they decided to remake. I would really love to see a movie based off of some of his other works, such as some of the short stories in one of his most recent works, Full Dark, No Stars. At first, I thought that this was just going to be another botched Hollywood remake, but then I saw who was being cast as Carrie herself. Turns out it is no one other than Chloe Grace Moretz, aka Hit Girl from Kickass. That is actually one of the better casting choices that I have seen in recent years. In fact, I'm actually kind of excited to see what will happen with this movie now that I know that such a talented young actress has been given the part. If Hit Girl taught us anything, it's that she can go from innocent and wide-eyed to ravenous and full of rage. Call me crazy, but if they do this right, she may be looking at an Oscar nod. That is probably a stretch, but Moretz has definitely shown that she has the chops. Only time will tell if this will live up to my recently increased hopes.