Martin's Musings

Matt Damon is a very likeable guy, and someone moviegoers can easily root for, whether he’s playing a genius from Southie, an amnesiac CIA assassin, or a corporate informant who makes a lot of stuff up.

But in the new film Promised Land, we know pretty early on that Damon is not the guy we want to see come out on top.

Here, he’s playing Steve Butler, who, with his partner Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand), tries to convince the residents of a small farming town hit hard by the tough economy to sell their land and allow an energy company to drill there. These two city folk arrive and quickly establish a local story and appearance, buying clothes from a town store (managed by the Man in Black himself, Titus Welliver) and emphasizing their Midwestern upbringing. It’s sketchy and inauthentic right off the bat. Continue reading →

The D is silent, but not much else about Quentin Tarantino’s new film is.

Django Unchained is the gleefully violent story of a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) who teams up with a German bounty hunter named Schultz (Christoph Waltz) to track down and kill some slave owners and other bad men, then convinces Schultz to help him find and free his wife, Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington, and yes, that’s really her character’s name), from plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

It’s the funny, bold, bloody, and oh so very cool revenge fantasy that Inglorious Basterds should have been — with a killer soundtrack to boot.

It’s also QT’s best film in years, and one of the best of 2012.

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It sounds like a double feature from hell.

Billy Crystal, Bette Midler, and Barbra Streisand starring in two movies with similar plot lines: Older Jewish parents have a hard time connecting with the younger generation.

Both films are aimed squarely at a mainstream crowd, and are being released within days of each other.

Should you see them as a double feature, is one of them enough, or should you skip them both altogether?

Here are my reviews.

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You’ve heard me say this before, but it’s so much better to be 38 than it is to be 40.

That’s exactly how Debbie (Leslie Mann) feels in Judd Apatow’s new film, This Is 40.

On her 40th birthday, she has her husband, Pete (Paul Rudd), put 38 on her birthday cake, and she puts the wrong birthdate down when she goes to the doctor.

When Pete takes Viagra so he can please her on her birthday without pressure, she freaks out: “We are young people! We don’t need medication to have sex.”

Nope, turning 40 is not easy.

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If the Mayans were right, then we are just two weeks away from the end of the world.

On that day — December 21, 2012 — a series of cataclysmic, catastrophic events are predicted to occur, such as the arrival of the next solar maximum, an interaction between Earth and the black hole at the center of the galaxy, or Earth’s collision with a planet called “Nibiru.”

In layman’s terms, we’re talking a disaster of Biblical proportions. Dogs and cats living together. That kind of stuff.

Of course, the end of the world has been predicted before, and we’re still here.

But on the off-chance that this time it’s actually going to happen — and there have been signs that this is all legit — I don’t wanna waste any of my remaining precious few hours.

If the world will, in fact, be ending on December 21, here are three movies I will definitely not be rewatching — and you shouldn’t, either.

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What is it lately about lowlifes and their cute little dogs?

In Seven Psychopaths, Woody Harrelson’s shih tzu was a focal point of the plot.

And now, in Killing Them Softly, some of the film’s laughs come from a supposed tough guy who walks around with a puppy.

Of course, that’s just about the only sensitive side on display in this movie, which is one of the grittiest, grisliest, toughest pictures of the year.

You’ll be forgiven if you call it this year’s Drive, but thankfully, Killing Them Softly is a much better, much more enjoyable movie.

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Alfred Hitchock is having a moment.

In October, 15 of his films were released on Blu-ray in a Masterpiece Collection.

HBO recently aired The Girl, a docudrama about the director and his relationship with Tippi Hedren.

And now there’s Hitchcock, a big-screen look behind the scenes at the making of Psycho.

You might call this latest film a prequel to The Girl, which focused on The Birds and Marnie. Either way, Hitchcock is an enjoyable look at the man behind the movie, and how he did things his way and changed the game forever. Continue reading →

There’s a right way and a wrong way to add 3D effects to a movie.

When done right, as in the Pixar movies, 3D can add depth to the picture, subtly enhancing a film’s visual appeal. In Hugo, Martin Scorsese skillfully used it to recreate the feeling of seeing motion pictures for the first time. And in Avatar, James Cameron used 3D to completely immerse us in a totally new world. It was showy, yes, but never distractingly so.

And then there’s the wrong way to use 3D, as evidenced by the unnecessary addition of effects in so many movies in recent years (The Avengers and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, for example), and the gratuitous effects used in cheesy movies like Piranha 3D.

Unfortunately, the new movie Life of Pi falls more in that latter category.

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