Category Archives: Movies

Dec 29 2014
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Movies

Movie Review – The Interview (2014)

Bookshelf Battler, here with another movie review.  So many movie reviews lately I should probably rename this site “Movie Shelf Battle” except that would not make sense, since movies aren’t put on shelves anymore.

But I digress.

So after all the hoopla, after the big hacking scandal, after the international hullabaloo, I finally had the chance to watch The Interview starring Seth Rogen and James Franco.

How do I say this?  I think the hackers might have accidentally done the boys a big favor.

I don’t mean they did them a favor in getting the movie pulled from – well, I’ve lost track, first it was every theater, then it was some theaters.  How did you see it?  I paid to rent it and Rogen and Franco now have 6 bucks I’ll never get back.  Lousy Hollywood types.

My thoughts?  Overall, the film is so-so and ultimately, kind of forgettable.  All of the free publicity caused by the hacking scandal will probably get this movie more views and downloads than it ever would have on its own, from people who will tune in just to see what all the fuss is about.

I love comedy.  Comedy is the most honest form of entertainment there is.  With drama, you can say you like it, that you even get it, but secretly you didn’t like it.  You’re just saying you like it to fit in and be cool.  But comedy?  If something tickles your funny bone, you will involuntarily laugh.  You might try to hold back, but if something is funny enough, you would be able to hold back.  And to its credit, The Interview did have a few moments where it did make me do just that.

But in my opinion, Hollywood has been on kind of a losing streak when it comes to comedy, and I mean laugh out loud, slap your knees all the way through the film comedy.  I haven’t seen a comedy that made me laugh from beginning to end since the original The Hangover in 2009.  So that’s, what?  Five, coming on six years since Hollywood has provided me with a genuine laugh all the way through the movie knee-slapper.

Do you mind if I give you SPOILERS?  Hell, the spoilers are pretty much out there already, aren’t they?

So, basic premise of the movie – Franco is Dave Skylark and Rogen is Aaron Rappaort.  Together, they are a duo that hosts and produces a celebrity gossip interview show – Skylark Tonight.  Rappaport feels the need to engage in more serious journalism.  The duo learn that Kim Jong Un is a fan of the show, so they arrange for, dun dun dun – an Interview.

The CIA learns of this and convinces the pair to try and assassinate Kim Jong Un, and I actually thought the film, rather than provide a caricature, actually provided an actor that is a bit tougher looking than the Dear Leader, but that’s just my two cents.

The funnier parts of the movie come from Rogen and Franco training on how to use a special Ricin poison strip on their hand, which they plan to deploy to Un with a poisoned handshake.  Naturally, the bumblers put the Ricin everywhere but Un’s hand.

At the end of the movie, Skylark and Rappaport, aided by North Korea’s turncoat propaganda minister, who secretly wants a free NK, decide not to kill Un but instead, to ambush him on air with hard hitting questions that will humiliate him and public and convince the North Koreans to reject him.

Skylark rattles off a lot of important questions about concentration camps, how the country spent 800 million on nukes when it has 16 million people starving, and so on.  Arguably, the film actually does provide a lot of important info to the American people, things a lot of inattentive Americans never thought about, namely that North Korea is a nuclear nation capable of launching a nuclear attack on the West Coast.  Yeah…yeah…sorry if you’re on the West Coast and you just read that, but try to get some sleep tonight anyway.  Probably not gonna happen.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

So toward the end of the movie, I think, “Wow, Rogen and Franco, how smart – they’ve used the assassination plot story line as just a pretext to reach an actual interview in which a lot of important political questions are asked, and important info is provided in a funny way.  But then, of course, they go ahead and have a final confrontation scene where Franco and Rogen, in a tank, go head to head with Un, in a helicopter, in a final battle royale to the finish.  So much for closing out the movie with a little dignity.

Like I said, it is not without its funny moments, moments that will make you laugh, but I doubt it will join the ranks of films I will ever bother watching again, so I think had the hackers just left this one alone, it probably would have easily faded into obscurity on its own.  Now with all the hype – I mean, Hell, my Grandkids one day will probably come up to me and be all like, “Hey Grandpa, what was that movie by those two doofuses that almost started World War III?”

I’m glad Sony did distribute the film, because to allow bullies to tell us what we can and can’t watch is just plain wrong – but sheesh, this was kind of a stinker of a film to get into such a major international argument about.

On a final note – this was a major event in direct to download movie distribution.  That topic was discussed earlier this year with the announcement that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2 would be released directly to Netflix.  Personally, I’m against direct to download first time movie releases, and I hope that all three of my regular readers, including my Aunt Gertrude, will feel the same way.

Why?  Go ahead ask me why.

Because I feel like that would just totally destroy the movie theater industry.  And sure, you might think back to the time you got ripped off at the theaters and had to spend a ridiculous sum on candy and popcorn but honestly – let me repeat, honestly – do you really want to see a day where going out to the movies on a Friday night becomes a thing of the past?  I certainly don’t.

Thanks for reading, Happy New Year!

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Nov 28 2014
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Movies

Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer

As I attempt to shake off my tryptophan induced coma, I am pleasantly surprised to see the new trailer for Star Wars:  The Force Awakens.  No Jar Jar.  No Ewoks.  No podracing.  Nothing that appears to be cute, cuddly, and/or adorable.  We won’t know until we see it but it is starting to look like it might be the Star Wars movie we all wanted to see:

Happy Thanksgiving Weekend…and if you are shopping on Black Friday, May the Deals be With You!

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Nov 09 2014
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Movies, Science Fiction

Movie Review – Science, Space Exploration and Interstellar (2014)

WARNING:  There are spoilers in this post that stretch the boundaries of space and time.  For every hour you spend reading this, you may actually be receiving seven years of spoilers!

THE BOOKSHELF FROM THE INTERSTELLAR MOVIE

As promised, I’m back with a review of the film Interstellar starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.  Here’s a fun anonomaly:  the other day I posted the text of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight” by Dylan Thomas, a poem that features prominently in that film.

There’s a scene at the end that involves messages being sent through space in time via a bookshelf and well, because this blog’s name is “Bookshelf Battle” and I had a post about Interstellar, I saw a surge in web traffic from people googling things like “bookshelf and interstellar” or “what’s the deal with the bookshelf in interstellar?” or similar searches.  Totally coincidental.  I would never purposely try to move traffic to my site by mentioning “bookshelf” and “interstellar” a bunch of times on my site because honestly, what would be the point of going on all day about the bookshelf from the Interstellar movie?  Frankly, it would be ridiculous to keep going on and on about the bookshelf in the Interstellar and to mention the bookshelf from the Interstellar movie would just be a sad attempt to drive up web hits – so believe you me this will be the last time that I’ll mention the bookshelf from the Interstellar movie.

Bookshelf.  Bookshelf.  Bookshelf.  Interstellar.  Interstellar.  Interstellar.

A CONCEIVABLE FUTURE

I’ve noticed a trend in modern science fiction – namely, to introduce inventions that aren’t around today but to do so in a conceivable manner.  The science fiction of the past dreamed of a day with flying cars and people walking around in funny looking aluminum suits.  For some reason, people in the 1950’s thought that aluminum clothing would be very popular by now.

Interstellar presents technology that we don’t have yet, but said technology is relatable given the way it is presented.  For example, the film features robots with artificial intelligence, but they look like walking/talking ATM machines, not metallic humanoids ala Terminator.

Meanwhile, the ship used looks essentially like a larger version of the Space Shuttle rather than the U.S.S. Enterprise.

The premise of the film?  The Earth is on the way out.  Centuries of abuse and excess have withered the planet’s resources, caused widespread blight and famine, and ruined the economy.  McConaughey plays Cooper, a former engineer and NASA test pilot who only briefly dipped his toe into a space exploration career when the world went into a decline.  His community is relatively stable and he eeks out a living as a farmer, living with his two kids, Murph and Tom, and his father-in-law.  His wife died from an ailment that normally would have been treated in better times.

Cooper isn’t a big fan of the farm life – he regrets never having had the chance to explore space and laments that civilization collapsed before he could do so.  Cooper’s father-in-law, played by John Lithgow, is the yin to Cooper’s yang, lecturing him about how “the world is not enough for him” and how that kind of thinking led to the downfall of the human race – i.e. so many people on a planet with a limited supply of resources and each person is never happy with what they have – they always want more.

There’s probably a lesson for world leaders to think about when considering how to best protect and care for the environment.  Also, Cooper training for a career that he never got to have is certainly a problem that many of today’s college graduates can relate to.

A timeframe of when the movie takes place is not provided, though I got the impression it takes places at a time when today’s millenials have become the grandparents, so maybe 2050-2060 or so?  Just a guess.

 

THE SCIENCE OF SPACE EXPLORATION

Long story short, Dr. Brand, played by Michael Caine, recruits Cooper to use his underutilized pilot skills to go on a desperate mission – fly through a recently discovered wormhole and find a new, habitable planet for the human race.  The humans will probably be good to the new planet for a year or two then proceed to mine and drill the crap out of it all in the name of cheaper iPads and dollar discount Wal-Mart merchandise but that goes beyond the parameters of the film.

He teams up with Anne Hathaway, Dr. Brand’s daughter, who is, herself, another Dr. Brand.  Also, there are two miscellaneous astronauts whose names I neglected to learn because they buy the farm early in the film.

If  you’re a nerd such as myself, you’ve probably thought a lot about space travel.  Though we often think about space travel beyond the moon as being impossible, it isn’t so much impossible as it is improbable.  In a myriad of science fiction movies, Hollywood has portrayed two different ways.  Let’s discuss them along with why they are unlikely:

  • WARP SPEED – Han Solo punches a button and all the stars around the Millenium Falcon stretch out in lines as the ship he won in an intergalactic card game wizzes through them.  The problem?  It would be extremely difficult to drive a ship that fast and not crash into something – a star, an asteroid, a piece of space garbage, something.  The ship would need incredibly accurate sensoring mechanisms and an advanced auto pilot that could maneveur at high-speeds because humans have yet to manage getting out of the grocery store parking lot without bumping into something let alone get around obstacles at mind-bending speeds.

 

  • HYPERSLEEP – Ripley in Aliens preserves herself in a pod that keeps her body in the same physical shape over the course of a long, multi-year journey.  The ship goes on auto-pilot and drives at a normal pace while the occupants of the ship take a nice, long nap.  The characters in Interstellar actually utilize this technology in the film.  A machine that can actually preserve a body and prevent it from aging would be remarkable, and would have many medical applications in addition to the obvious use in space-exploration but until society figures out a way to not make people wait in an ER waiting room for six hours, there is probably not going to be any headway in such a device anytime soon.

Rather than focus on warp speed or hypersleep technologies, Interstellar takes a look at another means of space travel that has heretofore been unused by Hollywood – the wormhole.  As the film explains, scientists believe that worm holes have the possibly to bend points in space such that a tunnel can be created between them.  (At one point, a character draws a line between two points on a piece of paper, then bends the paper so that the two points meet to illustrate how a worm hole makes it possible to go from one point to another without travelling the long distance of the “straight line” in between.

All of this is theoretical but the movie’s allure is taking all of these highly theoretical concepts and imagining – what if someone actually managed to physically follow through with them?

I applaud the film’s producers for taking all of these hard-boiled, difficult to grasp concepts, typically the stuff that makes the average high school student’s eyes glaze over and fall asleep in science class, and portray them in a very real and tangible manner.

SPACE AND TIME

Also at issue in the film is the concept of differences in the passage of time – i.e. that it is possible for time to move differently at one point than it does at another.  Cooper struggles with making the ultimate sacrifice – namely, that while he is in space, his children are aging and may eventually even surpass him.  At one point, the crew reaches a planet and Cooper is faced with the difficult realization that for every hour he spends on the surface, seven years will pass on Earth.   True to form, at the start of a brief mission to a water logged planet, Murph is just a kid but after the mission, she’s all grown up and played by Jessica Chastain.  Talk about the cat being in the cradle.

INTERSTELLAR AND THE BOOKSHELF AT THE END

I said I wouldn’t mention Interstellar and the bookshelf at the end of the movie and well, I’m not going to, not only to not utilize a cheap method of driving up my web traffic but also because I haven’t decided if this was the film’s “jump the shark” moment or if it was highly creative and imaginative.  You watch.  You decide for yourself.

PARTING THOUGHTS

I’m a big supporter of space exploration but I am a lowly nerd with a book blog so really, my opinion doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.  For me, it was sad to see the Space Shuttle program scrapped in recent years and it boggles my mind that we are paying the Russians millions of dollars to launch our American astronauts into space, especially at a time when the Russians haven’t exactly been playing nice with their neighbors lately.

I think there’s a lot that could be learned from not only localized space exploration (i.e. around the Moon and just above Earth’s orbit) but also deep exploration – i.e. let’s go to Mars!  Hell, if we’re willing to spend the money and are able to find astronauts willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, a mission to fly for ten or twenty years out into space to report findings back to Earth is not impossible.  Improbable, yes but not impossible.

I do get it – the economy is terrible, people can’t find jobs, there are all kinds of wars and turmoil going on in the world and in light of all that it seems selfish to toy around with space.  But as Cooper points out in the film, space exploration technology also usually gives rise to technology that helps out everyday life on Earth, such as the MRI machine.  Perhaps there are discoveries to be made by exploration of planets within our own solar system that could improve the quality of our life.

Or, perhaps Stephen Hawking has a point, namely that maybe there is alien life out there, but maybe we don’t want to know them.  Maybe there are nice aliens who will share all their technology with us and make our lives better.  Or maybe they’ll invade our planet and make us their slaves.

Who knows?  All I know is the film filled me with a sense of wonder about all the possibilities that space exploration has to offer.  Brilliant and uplifting, there was only one part of it that made me sad – that in the future, there will be so many amazing inventions and discoveries and alas, they’ll probably arrive long after I’m gone and I won’t be able to see any of them.

Oh well.  People in 1801 would have marvelled at the iPad, so at least we’ve got that going for us.

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Nov 08 2014
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Movies, Poetry

Interstellar and “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”

I saw Interstellar tonight and overall found it very moving and enjoyable.  As soon as I figure out what the hell happened, I’ll give it an actual review.  In the meantime, I wanted to share the text of the poem that featured prominently throughout the film:

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

BY: Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

If you’re one of the 3-5 regular readers of this blog not including my Aunt Gertrude, you might remember I provided some analysis of this poem earlier this year.  Check it out by clicking here.

At its heart, the poem is about clinging to life even when death is imminent, but the lesson applies to encourage readers to keep trying to achieve goals even when thing appear bleak and unlikely.  The poem fits in the film – the characters face the imminent demise of Planet Earth, yet try to achieve the unlikely goal of finding a new planet for the human race to live on.  The astronauts/main characters have the unlikely task of exploring parts of space heretofore never visited by man and though there’s a high probability of death, they push on anyway.

Thanks Hollywood, for incorporating a classic poem in your latest film.

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Nov 02 2014
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Movies, Not About Books

Movie Review – Nightcrawler

Halloween weekend has to be a bad time to open a movie.  After all, the movie watching masses are all out partying.  That’s too bad for Nightcrawler starring Jake Gyllenhaal as it deserves a wider audience.  In a world of remakes and reboots, it brings something to the screen as rare as a unicorn – an original idea.

Gyllenhaal stars as Lou – an odd eccentric fellow just trying to scrape a living together.  At the start of the film, he is uneducated and unemployed, but what he lacks in credentials he makes up with an uncanny ability to talk fast and spew out buzz words that employers love to hear during interviews.  Example – “I’m a motivated self-starter.”  In other words, he says alot of things that mean nothing but sound great.

Driving home after selling stolen construction supplies, he passes by a car accident in which police officers are heroically pulling out a female driver from a car engulfed in flames.  In awe, Lou watches as cameramen arrive on scene to film the chaos.  They’re independents who roam around Los Angeles filming carnage and sell their footage to the highest bidding news station.

Lou is hooked and sees this as his big opportunity to make something of himself.  He visits a pawn shop, trades his bicycle for a camcorder and a police scanner, and a small business is born.  He even takes on an intern.  Initially, Lou tries to talk his intern into working for free but eventually caves during negotiations and agrees to pay him thirty dollars a night.   As a noteable sign of the times, Lou is full of witty social commentary about the lousy economy – how employment is no longer guaranteed for the masses, how people need to be willing to work for free or next to nothing to get their foot in the door, and so on.

“The Nightcrawler’s” business grows and soon enough, he’s purchased a fabulous Dodge Challenger and honestly, at this point, this tricked-out sports car with its revved up Hemi becomes the star of the show.  The name of the game is to listen to the police scanner and to drive as fast as possible to accidents and crime scenes to be the first to film and sell.  Lou’s not the only independent cameraman in the business and he quickly developes a rivalry with Bill Paxton.

I don’t want to give away anymore spoilers – you can watch the film at eleven, so to speak.  Overall, the film is dark and edgy as Lou isn’t a typical hero but rather a fast talking sociopath who does whatever it takes to succeed in the nightly news business – and often goes too far.  Great acting and cast, including Rene Russo as the nightly news director who buys Lou’s footage, a ton of action and a pretty amazing car chase scene.

I reccomend it.  Unfortunately, when a movie is little off the beaten path, it gets relegated to an opening on a weekend where everyone is out partying and wearing goofy costumes, but hopefully it will develop a following and gain more exposure.

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Jul 06 2014
5 Comments
Movies, Not About Books

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull is a Red Hot Pile of Smelly Garbage

You may have noticed by now, that I’m a pretty kind reviewer. If I don’t like a book, movie, tv show, etc. I generally keep it to myself. After all, I haven’t produced a book, movie, tv show, etc. so who am I to criticize someone who has managed to turn their vision into a consumer product for a mass audience? If I like something, I’ll share it. If I hate it, I’ll keep it to myself.

But where I have to break that rule is with the movie, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. It’s on my mind right now because I’m watching the Indiana Jones Marathon on SpikeTV. SpikeTV, I doubt anyone from your network will ever read this, but if someone does, please remove Crystal Skull from any future Indy marathons. That film is a red hot pile of smelly garbage. Indy purists such as myself prefer to believe that it never happened.

In fact, rather than believe that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg decided to haphazardly slap together a pile of crap to cash in on the name brand of a long beloved film franchise, I instead prefer to believe either:

A) That this movie was the result of Lucas and Spielberg having simultaneous strokes, causing them to produce unintelligible rubbish.

B) That Shia LaBeouf had some kind of dirt on them

C) That the film was made not to entertain but to somehow subtely communicate coded messages about aliens to the world

D) That it was produced by a group of adults who had suffered through having to pay for their dumb kids to go to archaeology school because they saw Indiana Jones and thought that becoming an archaeologist would lead to untold adventures and world travels only to discover that it only leads to a career at Burger King and so they wanted to make the archeology profession look uncool.

I could go on all day about why this movie stinks worse than a pile of day old carp, but here are my big:

1) Aliens – I always enjoyed the Indy movies because of their supernatural elements. Yet, I did not like that aliens were such a big part of Crystal Skull. “But there was all kinds of unbelievable stuff in the first three Indy movies that were just as unbelievable as the idea that aliens exist!” you might argue.

True! And in fact, a topic for another time is that, while to date unproven, the idea of the existence of alien life on other planets is not all the unbelievable. However, in the first three films, there was the idea that if a man were to explore the deepest, darkest parts of the Earth, to study ancient books, tests, puzzles, etc. that he could uncover all kinds of supernatural mysteries. Believable or not, the first three movies are based on ancient cultural and religious ideas. In other words, finding a Holy Grail that grants the drinker holy life is about as believable (or unbelievable) as the existence of aliens, but hey, at least as kids many of us are indoctrinated into believing the bible, religion, etc. so the idea that an archaeologist could study old religious artifacts and legends and so on and unravel supernatural doings just seems awesome whereas having said archaeologist encounter aliens just seems like cheesy science fiction.

2) Failure to Take Itself Seriously – The Nazis provided the perfect villains for the earlier movies but, well, in case you fell asleep in history class, they were removed from power by the 1950’s so another source of villainy had to be found. Naturally, the Russians make for the perfect villains in a cold war era based movie, but the Russians in this movie just failed to be as scary as the Nazis of the other films.

On top of that, there was the scene where Indy gets launched out of a nuclear blast inside a fridge. Enough said.

3) Shia LaBeouf – Hey, he was great in the Transformers but I like to thing the offspring of Indy and Marion Ravenwood would be about 90 percent more awesome.

In conclusion, Indy 4 never happened. Indy 1-3 are the only Indy films that I recognize. There will never be a copy of Indy 4 on my shelf.

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Jun 23 2014
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Movies, Not About Books

Transformers Starring Mark Wahlberg – A Parody Trailer

NARRATOR: This Summer…coming to a theater near you…Transformers 4. We promise it will be better because we gave the kid that ruined Indiana Jones the boot and replaced him with Boston based actor Mark Wahlberg

WAHLBERG: Oh my friggin’ Gawd, dude! Did you see that? That friggin’ robot just turned into a friggin’ CAH! Johnny, Davey, Pete, Ed, all you guys get off yah bah stools, they got friggin robots turnin’ into cahs ova hea!

NARRATOR: See Mark Wahlberg in this special effects extravaganza.

WAHLBERG: Oh, hi there Optimus Prime. It’s nice to see you. Say hello to your mother for me.

NARRATOR: Transformers 4, starring Mark Wahlberg of the movie, Fear

WAHLBERG: I’ll tell the cops you hit me.

STARSCREAM: But I didn’t even touch you!

(WAHLBERG makes a crazy face and starts pounding himself over and over again in the chest.)

STARSCREAM: You’re crazy!

NARRATOR: Transformers 4, in theaters this Friday, starring Mark Wahlberg of the Oscar winning film, The Departed.

(MEGATRON opens the door to his apartment, a startled look on his face as he sees WAHLBERG waiting for him in a track suit with paper painters’ covers on his shoes, pointing a silenced pistol at him.)

MEGATRON: Can we talk about this?

(WAHLBERG shoots MEGATRON, who collapses and dies. WAHLBERG walks out. A robotic rat is seen scurrying along the window sill.)

NARRATOR: That’s Transformers 4 – starring Mark Wahlberg of Boogie Nights

WAHLBERG: I’m gonna be a star. A great big bright shining star.

OPTIMUS PRIME: Put that away!

NARRATOR: Transformers 4 – starring Mark Wahlberg. Because we need to break up the super intense special effects scenes with occasional scenes of uninteresting human dialogue to prevent you all from getting epilepsy. Coming soon!

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