The Semi Large Show

Directed by Todd Phillips starring Bradley Cooper (Coop), Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha, and Heather Graham.

This is a pretty good comedy. The premise is simple, Doug (played by Justin Bartha) is getting married so his friends take him to Vegas for a bachelor party. And what a bachelor party it is. The 4 drive to Vegas, have a few drinks and prepare for a night they will never forget. Fade to black. Phil, Stu, and Alan (played by the actors mentioned above in order) wake up in their hotel room trying to remember what had happened the night before. They start looking for their friend Doug who is nowhere to be found. So the trio start trying to remember what happened throughout the night, and well now we have the movie.

Think “Dude where’s my car” with the car being replaced by Doug. Actually that wouldn’t have been a bad name for the movie either “Dude where’s Doug?” So they venture through Vegas, meet police, Heather Graham, a baby, Mike Tyson, and a variety of other strange characters along the way while trying to find Doug. This movie has everything you would hope for in Vegas, gambling, shot gun weddings, booze, drugs, and other random debauchery.

The trio do well together and do keep you laughing through a good portion of the film. And stick around when the credits start rolling as that is some funny stuff as well.

Pros: Good comedy
Cons: Sometimes Galifianakis isn’t very funny
Verdict: 8 out of 10 go see this

Directed by JJ Abrams starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and Leonard Nimoy.

Just like any good Hollywood franchise they have figured out how to turn the original Star Trek storyline into a new ongoing series that they can sell millions of tickets to. You’ll understand what I mean by that after you go and see the film. Now what i was hoping for was a non stop action thrill ride, what I got was something completely different.

Being that they gave this away in the previews I guess I can reveal it here as well. Jim Kirk, the character that the guy from the Priceline commercials made famous, wants to join star fleet because his father died after being a captain for 13 minutes. In the original series this was different, but that’s why my comment above makes sense, parallel universes and such. So Kirk, Spock, and gang are going after this bad guy who likes blowing up planets and such with his giant drill. The guy who played Harold in the movie Harold and Kumar is also in this film as is the guy from Sean of the Dead (yes I do know their names, I just like saying where they’re from…see above what I called Shatner.) There is a lot of plot to this film and not as much action as I was led to believe from the previews.

The base of Star Fleet is in San Francisco, CA for some reason (I live in SF now which is why I keep mentioning it) and the bad guy with the drill wants to destroy Earth, meaning he wants to destroy SF and then the rest of earth.

Essentially what we have here is a lot of comedy and some action, which is completely different from what I was hoping for from the previews. Thankfully I paid matinee price for it.

Pros: Good acting, some decent fight scenes, you don’t have to be a trekkie to like it
Cons: No where near as much action as I was hoping for
Verdict: 7 / 10 - Matinee

Starring Christian Bale and Sam Worthington. Directed by McG.

Sam Worthington is a death row inmate who donates his body to CyberDyne (I hope I spelled that write) which is the company that created Skynet, that super computer that gets mad at people and blows up the world causing Judgment Day. So Bale plays John Connor, the 3rd actor to do so on the big screen (unless you start counting up the # of John Connors on IMDB then he’s the 6th actor to play John Connor, including the TV show) who is the son of Sarah Connor and supposedly the man who will save the humans against the machines. This film takes place after the war has already started and there are machines everywhere. That little annoying kid from Alpha Dog (the one who gets kidnapped) plays Kyle Reese, who was introduced as John Connor’s father in the original Terminator.

Basically a lot of humans don’t like Connor because they don’t believe he is the messiah. The war guys in the submarine come to the ingenious conclusion that they must attack the machines with some new sound vibration thing they found that renders the machines unconscious. Basically think of all the new age sound wave kind of things and you have the basic concept.

This film is indeed rated PG-13 but that didn’t stop it from being an action packed thrill ride from start to finish. I actually liked this film quite a bit.

Ironically its 1 of 2 films I’ve seen recently that takes place in San Francisco, the other one being Star Trek.

Arnold makes a guest appearance as well.

Pros: Non stop action thrill ride
Cons: I didn’t really have any
Verdict: 8.5 out of 10 Go see it

Southland Tales stars Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, and Sean William Scott. It is written and directed by Richard Kelly, the same guy who wrote and directed Donnie Darko and wrote Domino.

The last time we saw The Rock and Sean together was The Rundown which was quite a good film. This movie, however, decided it wanted to be clever and steal a page out of Star Wars. The reason I say this is because the film consists of episodes 4-6 of the series. 1-3 are available in a book written by Kelly with View Askew helping out here and there (the guys who did all the Jay and Silent Bob stuff.) Just FYI Kevin Smith is indeed in Southland Tales as are a variety of other famous people like Mandy Moore.

Ok so basically this is the plot to the movie. The Rock is some big hollywood action star who gets kidnapped and driven to the desert during the 2008 election. It takes place in 2008 and is supposed to be in “the future” of America after World War 3 with the Middle East, oil costs too much, new fuels are created, the socialist party (or something like that) are in an uproar, etc. The only problem is this movie wasn’t released in time for any of this to make sense. It premiered in 2006 in France to a few people at Cannes, then showed up at a fan fest thing in the US in late 07, then premiered on DVD in March of 08. The movie is supposed to be taking place in July of 08. The timing of this film was done incredibly poorly.

Think of Late Night w/ Conan O Brien. “In the year 2000…..” being done in 2008. For Conan it’s a funny gig that has been updated now that he runs the Tonight Show to the year 3000 being that Andy clowned on him for doing such an old gig. That’s how this movie feels. It’s similar to an Obama administration thing regarding the auto industry (I got this in my e-mail) which I’ll actually share here instead of going into a full movie review…..

{I recently attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker/guest was David E. Cole, Chairman, Center for Automotive Research (CAR). You have all likely heard Cole CAR quoted, or referred to in the auto industry news lately.

Mr. Cole, who is an engineer by training, told many stories of the difficulty of working with the folks that the Obama administration has sent to save the auto industry. There have been many meetings where a 30+ year experience automotive expert has to listen to a newcomer to the industry, someone with zero manufacturing experience, zero auto industry experience, zero business experience, zero finance experience, and zero engineering experience, tell them how to run their business.

His favorite story is as follows:

There was a team of Obama people speaking to Mr Cole (Engineer, automotive experience 40+ years, Chairman of CAR). They were explaining to Mr. Cole that the auto companies needed to make a car that was electric and liquid natural gas (LNG) with enough combined fuel to go 500 miles so we wouldn’t “need” so many gas stations (A whole other topic). They were quoting BTU’s of LNG and battery life that they had looked up on some website.

Mr. Cole explained that to do this you would need a trunk FULL of batteries and a LNG tank at big as a car to make that happen and that there were problems related to the laws of physics that prevented them from…

The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting here) “The laws of physics? Whose rules are those, we need to change that. (Some of the others wrote down the law name so they could look it up). We have the congress and the administration. We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an executive order to get rid of that problem. That’s why we are here, to fix these sort of issues”.}

OK, so the movie plays out something crazy like that where they made some new fuel that can power cars without oil. The only problem is soldiers get high off it too. For some reason there are soldiers all over LA that shoot commies (I have no problem with that) but for whatever reason The Rock gets wrapped up in this when Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays a porn star of all things, gets him wrapped up with them. Anyway, the movie makes no real sense at all and wouldn’t even qualify as a good parallel universe film. You can tell the guy from Donnie Darko wrote it as he starts going into weird rants about time travel and seeing your future before it happens and such. The political undertones don’t really make any sense in the film. It’s over 2 hours long to make matters worse. Perhaps if it were set in say, oh I don’t know, 2030 I would have liked it better but having it come out a few months before the film is supposed to take place and the thought police are running all over monitoring everyone’s lives, well no I don’t buy it. Clearly the writer didn’t like the Bush administration and was trying to put his thoughts on homeland security and not using fossil fuels into a crazy “sci fi” film.

Pros: The collection of stars in this film is awesome
Cons: The writer is terrible and its a shame so many good actors were attached to this project
Verdict: I personally give this 2 out of 10. My girlfriend couldn’t even watch more than 20 minutes of this. Although I have heard if you read the prequel (episodes 1-3) then watch the movie (4-6) it makes more sense.

The Book

The Movie

This romance comedy stars Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. Julia Roberts works for the CIA and Clive Owen for MI6 (the same group James Bond works for.) It’s 125 minutes long and is rated PG-13. The film has kind of an Ocean’s 11 feel to it as the two set out to out-scheme 2 rival companies. You see Julia Roberts has come to the conclusion that all the money lies in the private sector and if they can steal some sort of secret info from a fortune 500 company then they can make it rich and do whatever they want.

It’s a great comedy and hits on some funny romantic points as well, such as jealousy, mistrust, and anything else you would expect in a relationship. It’s light hearted so it’s easy to laugh at as well.

But yeah, that’s basically the plot the two want to make some money so they try to outsmart some of the smartest business men on the planet. There is a great cast to back up the two.

Unlike the last film I watched, I didn’t look at my watch.

Pros: Funny comedy, good date movie
Cons: I was slightly disappointed with the ending
Verdict: 7.5 / 10 I suggest you see this film

Let me start by telling you this film is 2 and a half hours long. About 5 minutes into the movie we were all asked to evacuate the theatre. I should have known that this was a warning that I should leave now and not continue watching the movie. Well, anyway we went back into the theatre and I spent the last hour staring at my watch praying for this film to end.

It’s not a super hero movie, its not an action movie. It’s not even a drama. It takes an hour and a half just to explain the plot. We follow around a masked super hero trying to convince the rest of the Watchmen that someone is out to get them. We see some problems between the former heroes and that’s about it. The masked guy runs around trying to solve his mystery while the rest of them go about their boring little lives. Richard Nixon is president for the 5th time or something ridiculous like that and the USSR wants to bomb us. So one hero is trying to make an anti-nuke thing or something like that while another is trying to make billions selling his image.

There is no real plot to this. There’s barely any action. Thankfully it was free. I can’t say a single good thing about this film.

Pros: The studio made the director cut this film from 3 1/2 hours down to 2 1/2 hours.
Cons: It was made by the guy who made 300.
Verdict: 1 / 10. This film was more torturous than watching Dr Quinn Medicine Woman. This is honestly the worst movie I’ve seen in a very long time and I watch those movies they sell at the Dollar Store starring Stallone’s brother.