What was the last movie you saw at the theaters?

The Puffy Chair (2006 - Jay Duplass)

A very small budgeted indie that played at last year's Sundance Film Festival, The Puffy Chair is a modest success. A slacker named Josh (Mark Duplass) plans a road trip from Brooklyn to Atlanta in a rented van, stopping along the way to pick up a LazyBoy recliner he purchased on eBay, a birthday gift for his father - a replica of Dad's beloved chair from back when Josh was a small boy. He plans on going it alone, but an argument with his girlfriend Emily (Kathryn Aselton) the night before makes him invite her along for the ride. The first day out they stop at Josh's younger brother's house. Rhett is a bearded New Age hippie who likes to spend hours marveling at the activities of bugs in the garden. Of course he comes along on the trip too.

Very low-key character piece that has moments of comedy but tries to keep them based in a reality rather than an escelating series of outrageous misadventures. The three primary actors are pretty good, and the underlying core of emotional truth and realistic conversations, especially between Josh and Emily about their relationship, ring true. It was shot for almost no money with handheld video cameras, and quite frankly it shows. There are many times that the bumping around and losing focus is far too distracting and took me out of the moment, but even so it's not a reason to miss the movie. The Puffy Chair doesn't really have anything earth-shattering to reveal nor does it sail uncharted cinematic waters, but it's involving, has a few genuine laughs, the acting is good and it speaks just enough truth to recommend.

GRADE: B-




The Break-Up (2006 - Peyton Reed)

The Break-Up is a pretty good movie, though it isn't really the one being advertised. Vince Vaughn plays another fast-talking jerk, Gary, who owns a tour bus company in Chicago with his brothers. Jennifer Aniston is Brooke, an assistant at a famous artist's gallery downtown. In the opening scene we see their "meet cute" as the confident Gary picks her up at a Cubs game with his charming verbal gymnastics even as she sits with her boyfriend. From there we fast forward a couple years to find them a couple with a fancy condo. Brooke's frustrations over Gary's selfishness and inability to lend even the smallest amount of help on the simplest things ends in an argument, and she breaks up with him. Her not-too-bright plan is that the prospect of losing her will cause him to change more into the kind of person she wants. Gary of course misses this point completely, and soon they are trying to one-up the other in games intended to spark jealousy.

What could have followed was ever increasing wackiness in the ways they try to make the other person crazy, or on the darker side it could have even gone the route of The War of the Roses (1989). But The Break-Up doesn't really go either direction, which is actually refreshing. Most of the "comedy" is packed into the first part of the movie, and as it progresses it becomes much more dramatic. Not that it isn't still funny, it is, especially with Vince being Vince, but the way the script handles the emotions of these two characters has a kind of honesty that most "Romantic Comedies" only awkwardly tack onto the final reel after all the hijinx have been exhausted. It doesn't really say anything new about the nature of relationships, but it does say it well. If you go in looking for this year's Wedding Crashers, you may be disappointed. On the other hand, you may walk out of the theater satisfied that they tried something different and less simple. I did.

GRADE: B-

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Two days ago I saw "RV", starring Robin Williams. While I didn't expect much (this was just another attempt to re-vamp the Chevy Chase/Griswald family vacation trilogy, as was "Johnson Family Vacation"), this movie was abysmal. I'd like to point out to Hollywood that at most RV parks, one is more likely to encounter a wealthy retired couple or a double-income suburban family, than one is to meet hayseeds whose only entertainment is watching one flush out an RV's septic tank. This portrayal just wasn't worth the laughs. And if you're going to accurately depict Colorado (I am a native Coloradan, living in Colorado Springs), please spend some time here. Yes, we have mountains, but in Colorado, the "granola"-type businesses are all but extinct. In our mountains, you probably won't encounter an earth-friendly "Alpine Soda". Instead you'll see big game hunting, white-water rafting and pure, rugged bonding with the great outdoors (no banjoes, please). And pleeeeeez, writers, we've had enough of the four-member family consisting of the hapless father, clueless mother (whom the writers don't know what to do with - they just need a mom), bitchy teenager, and the child anomaly (who alternates between the white kid who likes rap, the Asian who likes rap, the black nerd, the Goth, etc.). If the air conditioning in the theater hadn't been raging, I would have had a nice 2-hour siesta. Then again, I could have simply stayed home.

the last movie i saw in theaters was fun with dick and jane

Xmen 3

The last movie i saw was The omen. This movie was lacking its original suspence and horror. If u want to c a horror don't c this flick.. it was entertaining, some parts even funny, but i don't think it is a very good remake. I would like 2 c this flick again.. Overall i give the film 2.7 of 5 lawl

Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story (2006 - Brant Sersen)

This is a well-made and fitfully funny mockumentary starring "The Daily Show"'s Rob Corddry. The first great champion and star of the sport of paintball was Bobby Dukes (Corddry), a man with unparalled skills and a flowing mane of hair. But a decade ago Dukes was banned from the sport for commiting the one sin a paintballer can commit: he wiped. That's right, in the closing moments of the championship the great Bobby Dukes got caught trying to wipe a hit from his clothing to stay in the game. Everyone was shocked. A hero had fallen. Now after ten years of banishment, Bobby wants back in. Unfortunately nobody wants to play with a cheater, so the team he assembles is a pack of unwanted misfits. But maybe, just maybe, they have what it tales to win?!?

Simple premise, but executed well. Corddry is just right in the lead, and many of the supporting players are a scream, espcially Rob Huebel as Bobby Dukes' former teammate turned arch rival who became paintball's preening coverboy in the year's since the banishment, Rob Riggle as the testosterone-filled paramilitary loose canon and Brendan Burke as...well, you just have to see this guy doing his thing. The entire cast is good, and while it may be a one-joke movie it's the fun and often comedically subtle character work that carries it to the paint-splattered conclusion. I don't know much about the production, but it has the feel of one of Christopher Guest's improvised mockumentaries. It's certainly more like Waiting for Guffman than say Dodgeball. Blackballed has been making the festival circuit for a while but is now getting a limited theaterical release.

GRADE: B

Last movie that I saw in the theaters was X-Men 3: The Last Stand. I tend not to see that many movies in the theater just because of the distractions that too often seem to occur in theaters take away from the movie.

OSS 117: Nest of Spies (2006 - Michel Hazanavicius)

This is the laugh-out-loud funniest movie I have seen in years. An equal parts clever and silly sendup of Bond. And not just any Bond, but very specifically the earliest couple Bond pics - Dr. No and From Russia with Love, where Sean Connery defined the machismo of the superagent.

Jean Dujardin stars as Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, who's code number as a dashing international spy is OSS 117. After a WWII opening where we see Hubert in action against some Nazi scum, the story takes place in 1955 Egypt. With tensions building in the Middle East, OSS 117 must enter this nest of spies to find out what happened to a fellow agent gone missing and hopefully calm the waters along the Suez Canal. There he deals with Muslims, Russians and Germans all vying for a shipload of stolen arms. There are also beautiful women...and danger and intrigue at every turn.

As a plot, it sounds like a spy movie from the '60s. In fact, it kinda is. It's based on a character created by Jean Bruce, and in the '50s and '60s a whole slew of movies were made from his books following OSS 117. These were straight adventure films in the Bond mode. What director Michel Hazanavicius and his co-screenwriter Jean-François Halin have done is to take the character, the plotting and the tone from those books and movies (and of course from the first Bond films)...but they've turned it into a pitch-perfect, fall-down-funny, absolutely hysterical parody. Star Dujardin has the looks of a young, lean, tanned Connery, but he is also a brilliant physical comedian and his OSS 117 has been dumbed down to Clousseau-like levels. He couldn't be a bigger moron, and Dujardin commits to that clueless stupidity with a deftness and ferocity that has to be seen to be believed. The supporting players, who are all very good, essentially play it straight. The cinematography, sets, props, costumes and score all perfectly replicate an early '60s production. I mean perfectly. Really, really well done, and adds so many layers of fun to the flick. It's all just outrageously funny and incredibly well made.

OSS 117: Nest of Spies is a bonafide smash hit in France, so much so that a sequel has already been comissioned less than two months after its premiere. Hopefully this will soon find an American distributor, because the comedy and filmmaking are internationally appealing, to be sure. I've already heard it described as "a French Austin Powers", and while that's how it'll probably be sold it really does a disservice to label it that way. It is so much smarter, so much more firmly a parody and so much funnier than any and all of the Austin Powers movies combined.

GRADE: A

Saw these both theatrically on Sunday...


The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950 - Felix Feist)
The Window (1949 - Ted Tetzlaff)

Lovingly restored by the Film Noir Foundation, two terrific prints of two terrific Noirs. The Man Who Cheated Himself stars Lee J. Cobb as a Police Detective involved with the wrong dame. Improbably she's played by Jane Wyatt, best known as Robert Young's perfect housewife on the '50s sitcom "Father Knows Best". Here she's a rich society broad who is in the process of divorcing her second husband while carrying on an affair with Cobb. She discovers he plans to kill her, but she gets the gun and plugs him with Cobb watching. He decides to help her dispose of the body. Bad decision. Especially since Cobb's younger brother, played by John Dall (Rope, Gun Crazy), who is also a cop has this case as his first homicide. Great use of San Francisco locations, and it's always good to see Cobb in one of his few starring roles. This is definitely in the James M. Cain mode of Noir, where a basically decent guy makes some bad choices that he knows damn well are bad when he's doing them...but goes right ahead anyway.

The second film is The Window, starring young Bobby Driscoll as Tommy Woodry. Tommy is a nine-year-old boy with a bad habit of telling tall tales: robbers, cowboys and Indians, he seems to run into them all on an almost daily basis. His parents (Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale) have had just about enough of this behavior. One hot summer night in their New York apartment building Tommy goes out to sleep on the fire escape where it's cooler. He awakes in the middle of the night to witness his upstairs neighbors (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman) murder a man. Of course his parents don't believe him. Neither do the Police. The only people who believe him are the killers, who now know that he knows. A cat and mouse game ensues, and they do some menacing and at least one act of violence to the lad that I don't think you'd get away with even today (not in a mainstream Studio picture, anyway). If it sounds a bit Rear Window-ish, that's because it's from a story by Cornell Woolrich, who wrote the story Hitchcock's movie was based on as well (which was released five years after The Window). The cast and the direction here aren't up to the level of that masterpiece, but it's a damn good Noir just the same. This was the second Studio feature shot on location in New York, after Jules Dassin's The Naked City, and the metropolis is used very effectively, especially the old tenament where the finale takes place.


GRADES:
The Man Who Cheated Himself, B-
The Window, B

X-Men 3 "The Last Stand"

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

X-Men: The Last Stand
The Break-Up

The King - My God, this film is so twisted; but, to me at least, really rather funny at the same time. And worth seeing just to admire the sheer amazing ugliness of the son, 'Paul'. 2.5/5.

X-Men 3 - I dug it. Fun, disturbing at points, and the ending reminded me of Akira. So thumbs up from me.

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"You, me, everyone...we are all made of star stuff." - Neil Degrasse Tyson

https://shawnsmovienight.blogspot.com/

The Break Up- It was torture but, I had no choice in the matter.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

If it wasn't your type of film, why'd you see it? Or were you just brought to see it.

My sister and mom wanted to see it. So I read a review here before hand and was like no way and my mom was like too bad. It was just boring and pointless. That's all.

x men, it was decent

:d