Martin's Musings

Hey girl, Ryan Gosling is in a new gangster movie.

He plays a Los Angeles detective who is part of a secret under-the-table squad (headed up by Josh Brolin) that tries to take down a local division of the east coast mafia that’s run by Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn).

He gets to wear stylish clothes and be all charming and stuff.

And best of all, he’s paired up once again with Emma Stone, with whom he had amazing, white-hot chemistry in Crazy, Stupid, Love. Lucky guy.

But don’t get too excited, because in Gangster Squad, Gosling is not the cool guy we’ve come to expect, and his scenes with Stone are lukewarm. Blame it on the squeaky voice that Gosling uses if you want. I’m blaming it on the movie itself, which is big and loud, and employs nearly every gangster-movie cliché you’ve seen before in much better movies.

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December 26, 2004 was a day like any other.

In Thailand, it was peaceful, warm … a nice day for a family vacation.

And then, just like that, it all changed.

As you may recall, this was the day that a giant tsunami hit southeast Asia, devastating Thailand and leaving death and destruction in its wake.

Among the people who got swept up by the wave were the Belon family, who were on holiday. It’s their story that inspired the new movie, The Impossible.

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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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