The Weekend in Movies

When I wasn't doing homework or working in my sister's powder room (no, it's still not finished, but I'm hopeful that I can sneak over there one night this week and quickly grout so that this weekend I can do the cove tiles around the baseboard and be finished. We'll see what happens.) it seems I was watching movies. I'm not sure if the desire for TV has come from the fact that Tim and I are both tired and rather stressed or if it's just one of those cyclical things or if it's because our new dual tuner DVR arrives this week and we need to get all the stuff we can't reproduce (i.e. find a rerun of) off the DVR before that point. It's probably a combination of the three. Regardless, the movie fare this weekend included Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, The Fantastic Four, and Red Eye.

Wallace & Gromit is a very fun movie - and if you've seen them before it's exactly what you'd expect. Wallace and Gromit have established a humane vegetable protection company in anticipation of the upcoming vegetable competition (the prize for which is the much desired golden carrot). They have a unique, high-tech alarm system that lets them know when a rabbit has entered one of the gardens of their clients and they then zip off to capture said bunny. But, as this is a humane system, they bring the captured bunnies home and keep them in the basement in hutches, taking good care of them. At the same time, Gromit is attempting to slim Wallace down a tad by putting him on a veg diet. No more cheese, which is of course quite a problem for Wallace. So, in an attempt to cure himself of his cheese cravings, Wallace has built a mind manipulator - but before can test it, they're off to rescue more vegetables from bunnies. When they return they must figure out how they're going to continue to store the bunnies - they're at capacity! Then Wallace remembers his mind manipulator and devises a plan to convince the bunnies not to eat veggies. Of course things go hillariously wrong and Gromit again must leap to the rescue. Five Golden Carrots out of Five.

I should probably preface anything to do with the Fantastic Four with the information that I had only vague knowledge that this was based on a comic book. Thus, my enjoyment of the movie is on its own merit and not from any comparisons or misrepresentations of the actual plot line of the original comic. I am guessing that die hard Fantastic Four lovers were probably annoyed - comic book fans always seem to be irritated by comic book movies. That said, I found the Fantastic Four to be an enjoyable, fluffy movie. The plot is transparent, but that to me goes hand in hand with the whole comic book as movie genre. And guys probably will enjoy it as there are a good sprinkling of Jessica Alba in practically nothing shots and I have it on good authority that this is a good thing. Sadly, there are no hunky men in the film. The fireball guy is, I'm guessing, their attempt to provide man-candy, but...yuck. Essentially this movie serves as the introduction to a potential comicbook movie franchise, a la Batman or Spiderman, and is the initial development of their power, angst over said mutation, battling the evil mutated guy, failing to take the final step to finish off the evil mutated guy (so he can of course come back, as hinted at in the final scene), and reconciling themselves to being superheroes. That said, I still really enjoyed it and give it Four Cosmic Storms out of Five.

Finally, Red Eye. When this came out, I really wanted to see it - and then I learned it was a Wes Craven movie and my desire to see it plumetted, because Wes Craven = Horror and I can't do horror. I was very disappointed because it sounded like a neat plot idea. Then Jen wrote her mini-review and said it should be classified as a thriller and, well, I can do thriller. I'm glad I took the chance on it - because this is not a horror movie, it's very definitely a suspense/thriller. The casting was very well done - I enjoyed seeing a slightly different side to Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy was, yet again, a very convincing bad guy (he was the bad guy in Batman Begins.) I do think that the best line in the movie was probably, "Dude, there goes your pen." You have to see it to get it, but Tim and I have already adopted that as a new repeatable line. Essentially the plot is that Lisa's (McAdams) seatmate (Murphy) on the red eye flight home from her grandmother's funeral is actually the "manager" in a hitman type organization who is there to get her to move a DHS official from one room to another in the hotel she manages to make him an easier target. What I think I liked the most is that there was very little time spent in the "I'm just a spineless female, please don't hurt me or my family" mode - she was clever and determined to do the right thing through pretty much the whole movie, and that was refreshing. It's an edge-of-the-seat, squeeze someone's hand movie, and I give it Four and half Boarding Passes out of Five.