The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

1½  pipes out of 4

Incredible in name but too many detractors inhibit Burt Wonderstone to live up to it. An intriguing dark comedy about the aging magician duo of Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell) and Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi) trying to get their energy and awe back. This would have been good enough except writers John Goldstein and John Daley team with director Don Scardino to take things too far with the addition of Steve Grey (Jim Carrey). Carrey’s character is meant to be a satire of today’s magicians performing extreme acts instead of performing actual magic. Besides almost all of his tricks being physically impossible, Carrey’s character is a complete waste of screen time and deflates most of the comedy before it can get going. There is a point that Goldstein, Daley and Scardino is trying to make which is today’s society is more into brutality and reality than theatricality and awe, but like most of Carrey’s characters, it goes way over the top, even going so far as to make fun of rape by calling himself the ‘Brain Rapist’. Alan Arkin follows up his Oscar nominated role in Argo to supplement Carell and actually is a highlight of the film. He just seems to get better with age. Olivia Wilde plays Jane, an aspiring magician who once idolized Wonderstone but upon meeting him, becomes disillusioned. From the get go one can see that this relationship will be the romance of the film but it just feels wrong. From the way they portray Carell with his makeup and hairdo, he is easily 50 years old while Wilde portrays the young 20 something assistant. The age gap is just too wide to bridge without awkwardness. There were a number of comical moments in the film, most of which come from the interactions between Carell and Buscemi whose chemistry is phenomenal. Over all this is an ok movie which could have been much better without Jim Carrey and his character.

The Croods

3 pipes out of 4

While The Croods may be prehistoric, the story is beyond its time. Being a direct response by DreamWorks to the popular Ice Age series by Blue Sky Studios, at first glance it appears simply to be a repeat and redundant. But once you dive into the story that follows a human family instead of animals, you find a much more endearing characters and much a more relatable storyline. Emma Stone offers her husky voice to the young Eep, pushing the boundaries of her overprotective father Grug. With any other voice this may have been an ok character but Nicholas Cage brings every line to life with hilarity. Ryan Reynolds completes the hilarious trinity as Guy, the innovative love interest. The supporting cast is nothing to laugh at with veterans Catherin Keener, Cloris Leachman along with the comedic idiosyncrasies of Clark Duke. DreamWorks has revolutionized animation in the past and they continue to move in new directions, creating a character that is funny and dynamic while not uttering a single word. They also create a wonderful world with just the right amount of realism with while suspending the belief of the audience, with flying turtles and crocodile dogs. Director Chris Sanders lends his voice to my favorite character the pet of Guy, a sloth who has an eye for the dramatic giving his signature ‘dun dun dun’ in sometimes not the best places. Expected to be an Ice Age rip off, the Croods evolved into a world of its own, giving the whole family something to enjoy.

Olympus Has Fallen

1½ pipes out of 4

Olympus has fallen and it can’t get up. Even with an all star cast of Morgan Freeman, Aaron Eckhart, Gerard Butler and Ashley Judd, it just can’t seem to get off the ground. Besides the fact that the premise that the White House could ever be taken in 15 minutes is ridicules, Olympus Has Fallen appears to be a bad rip off of the original Die Hard. It is complete with all of the action movie clichés, with the classic double cross, there being only one person that can save the day and a hard nosed general who hates the protagonist for being better at life than he is. There are so many similarities it could be viewed as a Die Hard reboot to the naked eye. Another interesting fact is that while Morgan Freeman makes a descent president, he continues the trend in Hollywood if having a black man as the acting president whenever there is a horrible tragedy, remember deep impact? The 5^th Element? 2012? Aaron Eckhart plays the original president who gets taken hostage and has to show his bravado of everyone else can give up their codes to the nukes because he won’t give up his. Since he won’t give up his there is no point for others to resist, by this logic the fate of the entire world rests on one man when it could have remained on 3. Ashley Judd makes a brief appearance as the First Lady until tragedy strikes and Gerard Butler, head of secret service security detail to the president, is demoted to a desk job. Soon after, all hell breaks loose at the White House and Butler is called upon to unleash is inner BAMF. One thing that the film does have going for it is that Rick Yune does a wonderful job portraying a genius yet insane villain with realism, going so far as executing a hostage on camera after a failed attempt by the Navy Seals to retake the White House. The action is relatively nonstop which does help disguise the discrepancies making this a nice film to curl up on the couch on a Saturday night with popcorn and the $1 price of red box. 

Oz the Great and Powerful

3 pipes out of 4

James Franco really needs to make up his mind whether he wants to be a serious actor or simply the stoner guy. The man has magnificent talent but when he chooses more sophisticated roles as he does in Oz the Great and Powerful, he almost seems out of place. You are constantly waiting for him to light up and make stupid comments. Franco Plays Oz, a failing circus magician who breaks women’s hearts and is taken in to a tornado, propelling him to Oz. Zach Braff plays his side kick in both Kansas and Oz except in Oz he takes the form of a flying monkey. I typically do not like the movies that Braff tends to lean towards but he is surprisingly good with his witty humor and self deprecating act. Mila Kunis, who plays Theadora is the first person to meet Franco upon his arrival to Oz and almost instantly falls in love with him. Some critics have stated that Kunis is a poor aspect of the film and I would have to agree, only in that her storyline is far too rushed giving very little time for development. I thought Kunis did a marvelous job with what she had but she didn’t have much. Michelle Williams plays Glinda The Good Witch who tries to convince Oz to fulfill the prophecy laid down by her father in that a great wizard will come to Oz, defeat the evil witch Rachel Weis and become King of Oz. Almost all of the signature characters from the old classic Wizard of Oz are either in the film or referenced but with slight variations in order to maintain some kind of legal agreement. The Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow are explicitly referenced but the tin man is oddly left out. Except for some minor clichés and a few cases of obvious foreshadowing, Oz, the Great and Powerful is a wonderful film and does complete justice to the original it is prequeling. 

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

½ Pipe out of 4

Remember Van Helsing? Or The Brothers Grimm? Well Hansel & Gretel is a horrible mixture of the two with the vampires of Van Helsing and the pair of bounty hunters in The Brothers Grimm. To those who say that Van Helsing and The Brothers Grimm by themselves are bad movies, I am not one to disagree but Hansel & Gretel make them look like Oscar Nominees. Unlike the other two films the plot is absolutely horrible and not worth the watch. There is no character development while things move way to fast to actually understand what is happening. The love story that is supposed to develop between two of the main characters is only explained by the fact that one save the other’s life and therefore she is in love with him. There is more sexual chemistry between Hansel and Gretel than this love connection. A scene actually develops so that it looks as if Hansel and Gretel are going start making out. This scene could have been used to push forward the romance so the inevitable conclusion would be more believable but they chose to give it to a brother and sister. This film is the reason why January is the movie dump, demonstrating poor decisions in the movie making process and in order to get it out they release in the industry crapper. Gemma Arterton who plays Gretel has a hard time maintaining one accent and switches between old time and modern day, Renner at least maintained the consistency of the modern day accent instead of switching between that and old timey. From the moment Jeremy Renner enters the screen as Hansel to save a false witch, it is evident that he does not care about this film and does not put his best foot forward. The best parts of the film are just Renner's apparent disregard which comes across as the equivalent of a confused audience member, of which there were many.

Zero Dark Thirty

2 ½ pipes out of 4

Kathryn Bigelow has created another Hurt Locker only under a different name, more realistic and documentary style. She does a decent enough job chronicling the events that led to Osama Bin Laden’s Assassination, not in the thriller format that is advertised but in a scripted documentary that the audience already knows the ending of. The audience is introduced to the film with the audio of the final moment phone calls from the Twin Towers on September 11^th 2001; they are then thrust into a CIA torture scene 3 years later still trying to find Bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty has taken many shots from the military in how it portrays torture, understandably so because the film appears to glorify torture and declare it a necessary evil to fight terrorism. Jessica Chastain plays Maya; a CIA agent who becomes hell bent on finding Bin Laden and somehow happens to be in every key meeting regarding him. She dedicates herself from her deployment into the field until she sees Bin Laden’s body on a gurney demonstrating the drive of one person and the political bureaucracy that governs the CIA. Even though being designated a thriller, Zero Dark Thirty is more of a drama until Seal Team 6 enters Bin Laden’s secret compound. There the audience becomes part of the team not knowing what to expect and anticipating that fateful moment of discovering Bin Laden. To close the film, Bigelow gives the audience a scene of relief, security and uncertainty on what direction to go next. While Zero Dark Thirty is being heavily favored for the best picture at the Oscars to me it failed to live up to such high expectations and is too similar to The Hurt Locker to get my vote but it remains a decent film.

The Hobbit

2 ½ out of 4

Let’s take a ride with Peter Jackson once again into the world of Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, this time into the original novel The Hobbit. Broken into 3 movies at close to 3 hours a piece Jackson has plenty of time to expand minuscule details and keep everything from the book. Just keep in perspective, all totaled Jackson’s Hobbit will be longer than the audio book. All that aside, Jackson does a good job of connecting The Hobbit to his other Lord of the Rings films since they came first. There is an interesting cameo for Frodo (Elijah Wood), and the connection to Bilbo’s birthday in Fellowship of the Ring is purely delightful. I will also say that Jackson sure knows how to do a voice over prologue; he did it to introduce the history of the ring in the Fellowship of the Ring and does it again to introduce the history of the dwarfs. There were a couple of scenes that Jackson drags on for no apparent reason other than to keep his tradition of a 3 hour movie. Many of these scenes took place with scenery porn. Granted the scenery chosen is magnificent but there is just too much of it, it honestly took more than half an hour of the film put together. Jackson needs to let go of the 3 hour mold and accept that good movies can be an hour and a half or even two hours and doesn’t have to be three hours every time. Martin Freedman does a wonderful job as a young Bilbo Baggins and Ian McKellen plays Gandalf in masterful mystical way. But the character that stole the movie was Gollum/Smeagol played by the brilliant Andy Serkis. The dual personality of the tormented mind of Gollum and Smeagol is on full display in the interaction between Bilbo and Gollum. This interaction goes far beyond the small role it had in the book and becomes one of the largest and most anticipated parts of the movie. The scene may be slightly drawn out but Serkis’ performance simply makes it great. The Hobbit definitely doesn’t deserve the 11 Oscar nominations given to Return of the King but is still a fun adventure.