Martin's Musings

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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When we first meet Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) in the new movie Silver Linings Playbook, he’s fresh out of a mental institution, where he was being treated for bipolar disorder and anger management issues (he beat up the guy who was sleeping with his wife).

Those issues are still unresolved, as we see when, frustrated about the ending of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, he throws the book out the window and vents to his parents (Jacki Weaver and Robert De Niro) in the middle of the night.

If Pat doesn’t like that ending — or any ending that disappoints — he probably shouldn’t see this movie. Continue reading →

The new James Bond film Skyfall begins with an awesome, high-energy sequence in which 007 takes part in a car chase, a motorcycle chase, and a shootout, uses a crane to rip open a moving train, and then fights with an assailant on top of that train.

Then he’s accidentally shot and left for dead (which, of course, he isn’t).

And all that happens before the opening credits (which feature that gorgeous theme song by Adele). Whoa.

To quote another famous Bond theme song, nobody does it better.

So why, then, is our hero in danger of being put out to pasture?

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