Jonah Hex (2010)

I soooooo wanted this movie to be good. I recently saw Josh Brolin in Men in Black 3 and thought he was wonderful and was discussing his performance in No Country for Old Men which in turn reminded me of W. and so I searched to see what else the library had that I might watch him in. I ended up with this. Now, I am not completely unfamiliar with Jonah Hex. I read the comic as a kid, but to be completely up front mostly remember the reboot as "Hex" where the Jonah Hex character was mysteriously and inexplicably sent into the future. I also remember hearing about this movie being made as well as not recalling a single review of it. That's never a good sign. I knew that Brolin was in the movie and that Megan Fox said no to Transformers 3 to do this, a move I bet she regrets financially at least.
This movie sucked, but to be honest I'm not sure why. I thought the acting was passable, though every time I saw Will Arnett on screen I expected him to be setting up for a joke or to be making sexual innuendos - I think he's hilarious, but not who I'd pick for this kind of role, especially after seeing him in it. Megan Fox was not a disappointment and I will say that she held her own in her scenes, but really that's not saying that much. I think it got off on the wrong foot. They did some live action for like three or four minutes and then did an animated "origin of Jonah Hex" that lasted two or three minutes and then went back to live action to tell a story that didn't give a crap about characters. Honestly, the only character I cared about was the dog, and at times the Lilah character, but only at times.
This movie should have been the origin story, and the sequel should have had Hex hunting down Turnbull. As it was, there was no character building. I read the comic book, and I still didn't have enough to go on for most of it. It was a lot of, "oh that name rings a bell" and before I could figure out why it did the character was gone.
I'm chalking this one up to a bad script and bad calls made by the director. Though I would like to give special kudos to whomever's job it was to keep Megan Fox's boobs from popping out of that dress and pushing this film into an R rating.
It just donned on me how to describe this film and what I found wrong with it - it had the look of True Grit remake, the feel of the Wild, Wild West remake and the story of a Quentin Tarentino movie.

Jonah Hex at IMDb

X-Men: First Class (2011)

So....was this a prequel or a reboot? I'm going to go with requel. We have 3 X-Men movies that are more less consistent, we have the X-Men Origins movie which messes up some stuff but is trying to be part of the timeline and now this. Let's overlook for the moment the fact that some characters are out of place with the comic books, let's just think about the movie universe. Xavier is one of the main problems - we never know in the movies how he lost the ability to walk and this movie gives that to us which is all fine and good, except he loses the ability to walk as a young man, but in the 3rd movie, Xavier, portrayed by Patrick Stewart is accompanied by Magneto to the house of young Jean Grey, and he is walking. Speaking of Magneto, he has pretty much decided to wage war on humanity at the end of this film which is 1962 and roughly 20 years later he's back working with Xavier finding mutants? I will buy that he could have changed his mind and then changed it back, since that happens in the comic every time a new writer comes on board. Ororo Munroe is the next problem - we see her briefly the first time that Xavier uses Cerebro. If she's 10 in 1962, that makes her close to 60 in the first movie, and while it's not unheard of for mutants to age more slowly, that is not one of her abilities. For example, this is not a problem with Mystique who we know to be aging at half the normal rate, plus she can make herself look younger if she wanted to. I'm going to be generous and give Beast the slow aging power to, because he is almost the  same age as Xavier.
The other main concern of mine and I imagine a lot of fanboys around the world is when they take an already existing character and drastically change one or more things about him or her. Case in point, Alex Summers, a.k.a. Havoc a.k.a. Scott Summers younger brother in the comics. Is he supposed to be Cyclops father in this timeline? And moving the Hellfire Club from NYC to Las Vegas and making it basically a casino with a secret. Um, how does that fit in with Shaw thinking he and the members superior to humans? And while I certainly don't mind seeing Robe Byrne and January Jones stripped down to their undies, I really liked the aesthetic of the comic book Hellfire Club, it gave it a much more sexual aspect and also explained why the men treated the women the way they did. Speaking of January Jones, I've been watching Mad Men and her Emma Frost, whom I wish they had given the white blond hair to in the film, reminds me a lot of Betty. I haven't seen her in a lot of other things, so maybe Ms. Jones's characters are always like this, I guess the character she played in the Tourist was very similar as well. I'm also not so sure about Emma Frost being able to become diamond, does that happen in the comics? I don't ever recall it. Is Emma Frost one of the mutants that Wolverine frees in the Origins movie? Or, is that someone else who can turn to diamond?
I don't mind the movies creating mutants to fill roles, but it seems a shame to not use existing mutants from the comic books. I'm not sure if Riptide, Azazel, Angel or Darwin are in the comic books. They are all pretty cool. If they're not in the comics, I think it's cool that Singer added them to the film, especially as Azazel being on the same team as Mystique certainly explains Nightcrawler's origin. I also wonder why these characters, not counting Darwin, are not in the trilogy? If Storm can still be young and vibrant, why not Azazel? I'm betting it's just a case of retrofititis like Lucas did with the Star Wars Prequel - just throw in all this shit because it looks cool and never worry about why that stuff has disappeared by the later timeline stories.
Other than the above, which is certainly not enough to keep me from enjoying this film, I thought it went off quite splendidly. The story is wonderfully over the top and all the actors really get into their roles (I'm pretending that January Jones being really into a role looks like Emma Frost). I love the way the Governments of both the U.S. and Soviet Union are portrayed. Even better is the way the CIA is shown. Who would have thought that in the CIA, the only cool guy would be Oliver Platt? I also liked the way that the two opposing navies were portrayed in the stand-off. American and Soviet sailors doing their duty and not wanting to go to war, but willing to go to war if that's what their commander orders.
I enjoyed this movie enough, that unless something drastically changes, I'm going to watch the rest of the X-Men saga again in timeline order, so that means next will be X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and then X-Men 1 through 3.
I almost finished this without even talking about the goodness that are James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence. I think these are three of the finest young actor working today, maybe even going so far as to say that these are the three of the five top young actors working in movies right now. Two of the three were faced with the same daunting task that Ewen MacGregor was when he took on the role of Obi-wan Kenobi. Partick Stewart and Ian McKellen are two of the best actors alive and I would go so far as to say two of the best actors period. McAvoy and Fassbender had big shoes to step into, respectively. I think they handled it marvelously (no pun intended). Rebecca Romjin-Stamos is not a world class actress, so it was easy for Lawrence to overshadow her acting wise, but Romjin-Stamos is a world class beauty who lets it all hang out in her role as Mystique and Lawrence followed suit, or no suit as the case may be.

X-Men: First Class at IMDb

Prometheus (2012)

So this was the big prequel. Or maybe that should be a question? Prequel, sequel, schmequel. I don't think it really matters. With the possibility that a few names may have been used throughout the saga, and the fact that the dates are set before Alien in this film, it could be a sequel.
That's the problem with doing prequels in this genre - the movie tech today is so far beyond what it was when the original was created that it can't help but look more recent, regardless of when it was set.
This film was not as gritty or as scary as Alien. In and of themselves this does not make Prometheus either better or worse, just different. This film was iconic in its portrayal of the aliens and horrible tings happening to people in space suits, but other than that, it was much more straight up sci-fi, as opposed to the suspense sci-fi of the original.
The big stars of the film did as one would expect big stars to do and with the exception of Guy Pearce as Weyland, they were a pleasure to watch. Of course Noomi and Charlize were a pleasure to watch, I guess that probably went without saying. My problem with Weyland isn't really anything Pearce did or didn't do, it's the fact that he looks like a young or middle-aged man in old man make-up. Very old man make-up. It's funny but of all the things one could have a problem with in this movie, that' this is what gets me.
What does the ending of the movie mean? Are there going to be another set of movies that stand beside the Alien quadrilogy? One could easily follow the Shaw character through several more films. Personally, I would watch them.
While I was watching, I kept thinking of something Scott said not too long ago, that Alien (and Prometheus) take place in the same universe as Blade Runner. When I saw the way that Theron was playing the Vickers character I entertained the idea that she might be a replicant, especially when the captain asks if she's a robot. What if she is and just doesn't know it? That could mean that the outcome to the film is not quite what it seemed for her character. Or was Scott just saying this as a matter of world building that will really have no effect on the film franchises. Maybe he's setting something up for the new Blade Runner film he's working on.
Okay, you thought I was going to end without bringing up something very important to the film, but I'm not. What does Prometheus do to the whole Alien Vs. Predator story arc. I realize those take place several hundred years before Prometheus, and that's okay. What isn't okay is that they're explanation for the Aliens differ from what was put forward in this film. Though, you might be able to reconcile them. Scott didn't mention anything about those films, so I'm just going to pretend that they don't exist in the same universe. It's my blog, I can do that if I want to.

Prometheus on IMDb

A Dangerous Method (2011)

Excuse me, would somebody please get Keira Knightly a sandwich? And maybe a slice of cake?
Let me start by saying that all the actors did a good job, as did the costumers and set designers. I guess you know that when I start a paragraph the way I did, that there will be a "but" coming, so let me not disappoint you. But, I didn't like this movie and that is the fault of the writer and director, well less the former and more the latter I suspect.
This film that went to such great pains for authenticity totally dropped the ball on language, as do most period pieces. Freud (Viggo Mortenson) is Austrian, Jung (Michael Fassbender) is Swiss, and XXX (Keira Knightly) is Russian, yet they all speak in English - which Freud and Jung spoke with very heavy German accents, though not in this movie - which we are asked to believe is German. So German speaking Swiss sound like Brits to the German ear? And Austrians sound like Americans and Russians sound like Brits who sometimes throw in some Russian glottal sounds? At times I think that Mortenson was trying to do a British accent, but at other times he was adding a hint of German. I found this totally off-putting and wish that David Cronenberg would have just picked an accent and had everyone go with that, or even better, made a German-speaking film with subtitles.
The other big area was how flat the characters were. Were Freud and Jung so dispassionate that even in their most heated arguments they sounded like a high school practice debate? Perhaps Cronenberg was trying to point out how gentlemen of that era did not get passionate in public or with friends, but if so he missed the mark as there was no context to put this into. He could have taken a lesson from all the wonderful British dramas set in that time.
Meh. I wanted more about anything in this movie - more about the conflict between Freud and Jung, more about the passion between Jung and XXX, more about Jung's loveless seeming marriage.
I repeat, meh.

A Dangerous Method on IMDB