Remember Me (2010— 113mins) R. Pattinson, E. de Ravin

    Remember Me is a romantic drama about two scarred people who have lost someone close to them in their lives. It revolves around their romance and their relationship with their equally scarred and flawed fathers. I have sort of been avoiding this movie b/c I haven’t seen any trailers that I can remember and the covers of the dvd’s and the thumbnail on the red-box all make it look like an aloof and goofy movie. Well it’s none of those. It’s basically gloomy and the drama is in the conflict between all sorts of characters. However, this I can deal with. I have seen some chatter on the net while looking for the above picture that people were a bit mad that it turned out to be a drama rather then a comedy. I can definitely live with that. What is CANNOT live with is the director/writer’s ending. It completely ruins the whole film and ruin’s the whole replay value. I have reviewed/watched movies in the past that I don’t think I would watch again b/c I think the movie itself was meh, but they generally have an ending that was plausible with the story. This crappy ending leaves me rather annoyed that I spent the 2 hours interested in the plot and the characters. (Which was hard to do b/c once we start to meet Pattinson’s character he’s so scarred and acting ridiculous that it’s almost unbelievable but the story eventually gets us past this extreme character building by using his natural charm and his coy smile)

I will try and not spoil it at all but I will say that the ending is kind of a bombshell and out of left field. Some people tend to like this but it’s soooo out of left field and has so little to do with the story that turns the movie into a complete failure. Two things the GeekJock wants in a movie (especially endings) is closure of sorts and the ending to MAKE SENSE with regard to the story. This partially, at best satisfies one of those.

Verdict–> Run away. You will thank me. The only people who will like this movie are people who love Pattinson’s “dreamy” eyes and those who like stabbing their own eyes with sharpened pencils for fun. I warned you. But if you like to waste 2 hours of time by all means have fun.

   In life w get so many distractions to doing what we REALLY deep down want to do, WATCH TV! So with school, work, kids etc there are a ton of TV shows I really never got into the 1st time around. So the good thing about working nights is there is a ton of syndicated shows that you get to watch and over the course of a year or two you generally get almost all of the episodes of the whole run. This is good for most cases unless it’s a show that wasn’t on very long and the station recycles the episodes flip back to the beginning too quick and repeats of repeats galore.

• That 70’s show—> I am not sure if it was just on a day I watched something else or if I truely just didn’t like it, but I really never watched this show much when it was on. Now that I watch it most week nights at work it has def grown on me. The relentless abuse they give each other and the funny as hell theme shows are awesome.
• The Office—> I orig liked this show when it started but eventually during the 1st season the uncomfortable humor just got to make me feel too uncomfortable and just didn’t watch it much. Now that I get to watch it a ton I love it all over again. It definately toned all that down after the 1st few episodes or you just get over it. Either way the show really grows on you. B/c of work and life I still cannot watch new ones on a reg basis so I will just have to wait until the new ones come on re-runs to see them. BUT, I just don’t think the show can survive without Steve Carrell.
• Everybody Loves Raymond—-> Another show I never got into at first and then just didn’t watch much as the years went on. Now I watch it all the time and even catch it as much as possible if not much else is on (TV land has a ton of marathons too). Plus Mrs Geekjock and I are often compared to Ray and Deborah. Simply one of the GeekJocks top 10 sitcoms of all time. I guess that means I will have to come up with my top 10 Sit coms of all time eventually too!
• Angel—> While not a sitcom it’s still in syndication and still on every mornign at 6am on TNT (or TBS not sure which it is). This was a classic show by Joss Wheedon and was well written and great to watch. The only problem is it was only on for 4 or 5 seasons so it flips in only a couple of months and I think I have now watched all of these 2-3 times each over the last couple of years and I think I might have gotten a bit burned out on it.
• Scrubs–> I always liked this show but again never got to see it as much as I liked to. So now that I get to see it a few times a week I can catch up on some of the shows I missed when it was on. The in the head monologue stuff is always great, kinda like a toned down Dream On (if anyone remembers that HBO CLASSIC).

So what shows have you found on Syndication that you just never got into when they originally were on and they just grew on you?

The Guild has put up the next episode (# 3) of the season and it seems Codex’s Computer is still fritzing… and Bladezz is a whizz at frozen chicken bowling… To try and make any sense of they you will just have to watch the new episode!

Crazy Heart (2010—112 mins) Jeff Bridges

   Many people might know Crazy Heart as the much overly hyped movie which won Bridges a big gold statue for best actor. I will say the movie is an interesting watch , well written, and I will admit,  Bridges deserved the statue. Let me digress a bit first with the nominees. Of the leading men he was up against I only saw 2 other of the movies (Up in the Air and Hurt Locker ). I think Clooney’s performance might rival Bridges here but it’s too close to call.  Renner, while good in Hurt Locker isn’t even close to these two elder statesmen’s performance. Bridges really outperformed the movie, b/c it was good but the overall story is decent (and like I said well written) but it’s just not overly gripping or memorable.

  Bridges plays Bad Blake, an aging alcoholic country music star, who has stayed on the circuit trying to get that break to get his career back on track. He regularly drinks himself into a stupor and has one night stands on the road. He eventually gets to that point where being broke and drunk just gets to be too much on his shoulders. Much of this comes to his mind after he meets a single mother and journalist played by Maggie Gyllenhaal.  His relationship to her and her son make a lasting impression on Blake and the movie is centered around his voyage to getting his shit together.

   It’s a difficult movie for me to really get a grasp on how I feel about it. Bridges was great and the movie kept me interested as I was watching, but I never got the feeling at the end where I wanted to say “OMG this movie was great”. It was just good. As I like to say about some movies it’s one I am glad I got to see but I won’t go buy it and won’t go out of my way to see again but I would recomend it to others to see Bridges excellent job with acting and singing.

Verdict—> Go ahead and keep it in mind to see it. I wouldn’t go nuts and put it on the MUST see 1st tier of Red Box picks but it is a solid second tier pick. If there is not something you just HAVE TO see in the box then go for it.

Alice in Wonderland (2010— 108 mins) Depp, Carter, Hathaway, Mia Wasikowska

   A lot has been said out there on Tim Burton’s latest update of an old movie. Some of it good a lot of it bad. First we got Wonka and now we got Alice.  Unlike most critics who get paid for there overall critique, I tend to try and review movies on whether I liked it and if I think other people will both like it and should see it. 

   How do we look at the original Alice? To me it’s a kid’s story there to amuse little children, and has some undertones in it for adults and is just frickin weird. However, it succeeds at being a fun kids movie. You really have to go into this update looking for an hour and a half escape to be entertained, with the colors and the exaggerated characters and slight semblence of a “story”.  If you have not seen it before, I do recommend you see it. It’s entertaining and fun to watch, but beware, there are ton’s of faults. You might not want to see it again for fun( unless of course your kids love it then you might have to) but it is something I think most people will want to see once at least.

   The reasons for the negative part of it? Well, it’s Burton. Tim Burton is starting to become a cliche’ of himself. A joke by his own name. He is starting to be strange and unusual for the pure SAKE of being strange. Again this is Alice in Wonderland the whole story is supposed to be strange, so I will give him a little bit of a pass here. What I just cannot give him a pass on is the occasional piss poor CG effects. There are some great effects in the movie but there are also some shots where it looks like 2 people standing in front of an image on a screen. Granted green screens are fairly commonplace in most CG needed scenes, but they don’t need to look this bad. When two people are with a GS it usually doesn’t just look like a projector is making the image appear int he background. If you can deal with some of those “WOW that looks bad” moments then you can enjoy the movie just fine. There are some accents and low talking (which drive me batty too when I can’t hear it all) so try and pay attention some it might get hard to hear for you too.

   Special thumbs up to Crispin Glover and Helena BOnham Carter who were BOTH outstanding.

Verdict—> As an adaptation of a children’s movie with adult metaphors and themes it hits the mark just fine. Get past the Burton-ness and just lazy CG moments and you will like it. Your kids might like it too, not overly scary at any part and great colors so those new shiny TV’s everyone now has will make it look good too. Remember this is Alice in Wonderland not Citizen Kane so don’t take it too seriously.

With a lot of big name MMO titles coming out in the next year or two the temptation to opt in for closed or open beta is huge. I have done my share of betas in the past and I have recently tried to think of how much these have influenced whether I played the game or not. I understand that most games evolve quite a bit from betas to launch and then from 1 year out but sometimes the damage is done.

Some games I have tested in Closed or Open beta include Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Vanguard,  Champions Online, Fallen Earth, Allods online, and Warhammer Online.  Of all of these the only one I played after launch was LOTRO and it was fun for a while but the grind became evident and I kept saying with every step of the way, “it’s fun but every feature which is good is just so much better in WoW.” So after 4 months or so I stopped my Sub and went back to WoW. With regard to LOTRO I do have to say that if I had more sustained time for the game and some more guild interaction I think I might have taken to it a bit more but it’s a bit hard for me to go too multi player these days due to family/work etc. So it was back to WoW.

Also of the others, the only one I think I might ever go back to try is Warhammer (or possibly DDO) but the whole free to play nonsense and how they clip your playing soo much has me a bit jaded on those titles. So what is my point? Well basically my point is I think playing these titles in beta has caused me to just not like them and not want to play them. Almost all of them at one point or another I had high hopes for and wanted to play them in release, or for some I just got a beta invite and figured what the hell. Granted I am glad for this for some titles (Champions, Vanguard), but in those others I might have missed out.

So now there is the obvious question. With these big titles coming out (yes, I know some of them aren’t even in beta so save it), WoW:Cataclysm, DC Universe Online, Star Wars the Old Republic, the question is should I want to beta or should I hold out and just play a finished product. At this point I am so excited to see Cataclysm that it’s hard not to use the beta invite but with things changing so much every day and the fact I want to enjoy every second of leveling both to 85 and a new toon I will simply wait for whenever “it’s ready ” per Blizzard and play away.

As for DCUO, I am not sure with SOE making it if I am going to like it or not so a beta (especially FREE!) wouldn’t hurt a bit, or else I will more then likely wait a month or two into the release to see what the consensus says of the new title.

Which brings us to Star Wars:TOR. It looks so amazingly epic that I am fairly certain that no matter what I will just simply be subscribing on day 1 and give it a good 2-3 months of play and if it disappoints well then so be it, or else I will enjoy the hell out of that new title. But that’s about a year away as well so who knows what happens between now and then.

All things that are certain, there are 3 games I am dieing to play and it’s going to be hard to resist but I think I have enough things on my plate to keep me busy until release of these. But I ask you. Is it better to get a head start and probably ruin some of the surprise of the game, or just wait and bask in it’s doneness upon release??

The Runaways (2010—106 mins)  K. Stewart, D. Fanning

The Runaways is a biopic about the afore named all girl rock band in the 70’s featuring the likes of Joan Jett and Lita Ford. The story centers around Jett (Kristen Stewart) and original lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning).  One thing that will help you get off on the right foot when watching is to know it is based on a book by Currie and was also exec produced by Jett. Also it was not wholely endorsed by some of the rest of the band so that kinda explains why the movie doesn’t go too much into more then Jett and Currie. The movie also starts off a bit slow so bare with it and fight thru it b/c it gets better as it goes.

   This is, in a way, a typical band story. Small unknown band goes from nothing to something then crashes. Yet here a true story makes it seem a little different. It doesn’t seem like the movie is trying to exaggerate the characters or make them super human. It’s just a story of two girls. One (Jett) who just wants to rock and music is her life and a way to live and belong. The other (Currie) is using music to help herself cope with a drunk father and selfish/oblivious mother. She loves the music but ultimately she can take it or leave it and cannot escape from the fate of abuse that is seemingly in here genes.  The typical watcher just goes into the film knowing almost by heart, the anthemic “Cherry Bomb” (ch,ch,ch,ch,ch,ch,ch CHERRY BOMB!!!), and we all know Jett can just plain ROCK. But not many of us (myself included) know the intimate story of the band and the before she was the Rock Queen of Jett as well.  Stewart plays Jett to a tee. She has the same mannerisms of her on the guitar and has the F-U attitude down pat (I guess having Joan herself on set will help that a bit too). Fanning by contrast plays Currie as the polar oposite frail girl well too.

Director Flowia Sigismondi does a great job of filmaking here. There are a bunch of subtle shots of symbolism and use of lighting to show us things are not what they used to. The subtle shot of a drain on the plane shows us how the band/story is really about to hit a real low point and headed to bad places. And when the band is at the brink of breakdown the subtle change in lighting shows us how critical the situation really is.

As always I have a slight gripe. There are times where the movie does drag. I don’t just mean the slow opening to it, but the nearing to the end. We all know and get it, Joan Jett is a star and Currie is struggling with addition and losing it a bit with the pressure of family both at home and band family. We just don’t need to see it dragged out for as long as it did. She could have cut out about 10 mins of screen time of it all and been just as good with it all.

Verdict—> I liked this movie quite a bit. It might not appeal to everyone tho. I am a music guy and love rock, and love anthems such as Cherry Bomb , (Jetts Bad Reputation is one of my fav songs of all time) but not everyone does. Some people won’t like the film style the pace of it or the usual up and down story of rock bands, but I don’t care it’s good anyway. I think alot of poeple will enjoy it for that. If this sounds like something you will like then go for it. Another R rated movie with sex drugs and rock and roll so again NO KIDS.

Operation Endgame (2010— 87 mins) Galifianakis,Corddry, Barkin,Rhames

This is a straight to DVD movie which was exactly what the value of it is. If it was any more then one dollar I would feel a bit robbed. The premise is two highly trained secret government operative teams work on assassin missions. When one of the big wigs of the whole organization is murdered it sets off a civil war of fighting and killing amongst themselves. I REALLLY wanted and expected this to be a mindless fun action movie the likes of Shoot em up and Smoking Aces. And for some of the movie it was. But my biggest mistake was trying to make sense of the speckled plot. It rarely makes sense any of the way. We know everyone is trying to kill each other and no one trusts the other. Other then that hell if I know. There are a ton of mid level actors who are here to really mail in their 10 mins of screen time (Rhames, Barkin,  Tambor erc). I try to think that if they expand upon the embarassment of 87 mins in length they could have helped the lack of character development and complete and utter piece of crap ending. I have seen head scratching Tarantino endings that have satisfied me more.

Verdict—> Seriously don’t bother. It has some laughs here and there but even those aren’t worth a dollar. If you are drunk and bored one night with the cable box MAYBE, but that’s about it.

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010— 99mins)  Cusak,Corddry, Robinson, Clark Duke 

There really isn’t a whole lot to say about this knee slapper. It’s a funny as shit romp of a movie that we will prolly be seeing on TNT and comedy central for years to come. Four misfits travel back in time to 1986 as themselves and have to figure out how not to screw up the world and get back to 2010. It’s implausible and ridiculous as a plot, but who gives a shit its a damn hot tub time machine! Throw this up as a tamer mix of the Hangover meets Road Trip meets Back to the Future.  There are also a couple of bit parts/cameos as well. Chevy Chase is fairly forgettable in his role, whereas the opposite can be said for Crispin Glover. I am not sure exactly what it is about the whacky actor but he just seems to be able to embody a great combo of funny, whack-a-doodle, creepy and strange in everything he does.  Weather he is a doorman here, or Andy Warhol, or the Knave of Hearts (Alice in wonderland) he just never disappoints in his role no matter how small.  Another good cameo is William Zabka who is hilarious here. You just gotta love a guy who embraces his 80’s-ness and his kitschy knack for being a complete ass. Kudos Billy!

Verdict—> As I mentioned it’s funny as hell, red-box it ASAP. But language is EVER pressent as are boobies,this is a strict R movie  so no kids, but the rest of us who love boobies and F-bombs will enjoy!

The Bounty Hunter (2010— 110 mins) Gerard Butler, Jennifer Aniston

Today was a good day for pickin’s at the Red Box..Since I usually go after work to get the movies for that next evening (Sat am and Sun am) the choices usually are slim and suck. Also usually we watch 3 movies each night. I was so happy with the array of movies I saw in there this morning that I said screw it 4 movies it is!!!

1st up on the evening was The Bounty Hunter. This actiony Rom-Com stars 2 people who are not to hard on the eye for each of the opposite sexes. Jenifer Aniston looks extremely Hot. I mean moreso then we have seen her in anything in some time. And naturally the ladies will be happy with Gerard Butler. (Mrs. Geekjock is a big fan of the likeable big scotsman so I guess he’s ok in my book too) Butler plays Milo Boyd an ex-cop turned Bounty Hunter, who gets a case dropped in his lap to recover a fugitive that just happens to be his Ex-Wife. Aniston, as said ex-wife Nichole, is a reporter trying to get a scoop on a big story and thus ends up missing a court appearance and had skipped out on bail prompting the warrant.

What follows is, as usual, typical rom-com fare. It’s the chase the fugitive wrapped up in a action murder solving case for the couple and, who knows maybe re-kindle some sort of spark. Yep, we all know we have been there done that, but the movie is good. It’s a bit longer at just under 2 hours but the pace moves fairly well that we almost don’t notice at all. The writing is good,the performances are fine, and as I said Aniston (and Butler I guess ) is REAL easy to watch for this time.  To put it in perspective it’s a lot easier to follow or sit thru then Leap Year which I reviewed last week.

Verdict—> Among the better rom-coms that have come along in the last year. Easy to watch with a spouce or a date. A top tier rental from the Red-Box, so pick it up next time the little lady wants a chick flick and you should be able to stomach it alot easier then some others.