Category Archives: Movies

Falling in Love with Her

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Admitting to your friends that the film Her, directed and written by Spike Jonze, is one of your favorite movies instantly puts you into the shoes of the film’s protagonist Theodore Twombly.

“Wait isn’t that the movie where that dude falls in love with a computer?”

“Well actually his OS…”

“His what?”

“OS…Operating System. Like what runs your computer”

“Oh…and you liked the movie?”

Yes, despite the judgment, I did. In fact, much like Theodore fell in love with Samantha, his artificially intelligent operating system, I fell in love with the film about love, loss and acceptance.

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We’ve All Had 500 Days of Summer

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Hey Tom, look, I know you think that she was the one, but I don’t. I think you’re just remembering the good stuff. Next time you look back, I really think you should look again. 

Not many movies have the balls to tell you up front how they’re going to end. Tom and Summer share a romance that winds up going south. We learn that before the opening credits even roll, but how are you supposed to invest in the journey when you know the destination? By conventional Hollywood rules, we shouldn’t find out if the boy gets the girl until the end of a love story. You know, fairy tales and happily ever after and all that jazz. Only 500 Days of Summer isn’t about whether it will work out between the main characters.

Our challenge as the audience is to be comfortable having all that information ahead of time. The reward is a much richer experience than you would have with your typical, sappy romantic comedy, and one that is equal parts poignant and humorous. When you get right down to it, that’s what a relationship brings to your life: a genuine connection with another person that provides joy, laughter, and eventually in most cases, sorrow.

And let’s just say it’s a little easier to be up to the challenge when you see Tom’s plight and can clearly picture yourself.

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Spielberg Introduces “The BFG” to the Next Generation

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I remember being in second grade and listening intently as The BFG was read aloud to our class. This was somewhat of a trend, you see, as our teacher had already shared several classic Roald Dahl tales with us: Fantastic Mr. Fox, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, you name it. While those readings have faded from my memory, for whatever reason I can clearly picture hearing about Sophie and her Big Friendly Giant for the first time.

To be honest, I’m surprised it took this long for BFG to receive the big screen treatment. Nonetheless, I was admittedly nervous when I heard that it was finally happening, despite the fact that Steven Spielberg was chosen to helm the voyage into giant country. Adapting children’s novels into a feature length film is tricky. There is rarely enough material for a complete screenplay, which usually means that a lot of new scenes have to be added to get us from Point A to Point B. Sometimes this enhances the story and makes for a wonderful experience and other times you wonder why the filmmakers didn’t just leave well enough alone.

So did Spielberg pull it off? Well, that depends on what you’re looking for. Allow me to explain.

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Star Trek Into Darkness: Yeah, They Lied About Khan

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(Update: This was a review I did for Into Darkness back when it came out. Yes, I’m just as mortified as you that it’s already been three years. With Star Trek Beyond being released tomorrow, it seemed like a good opportunity to share my thoughts on the first two Trek films in this series. I just didn’t feel like writing a brand new post for it. Plus, it’s always interesting as a writer to revisit old material and see how your style and voice has grown. The original review will now commence)

Depending on where you fall in the whole Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate, you may view the upcoming slate of films to be a period of intense competition or a window of rare opportunity. I’m inclined to side with the latter. After all, it’s not every day that the same promising young filmmaker is chosen to helm the two most iconic science fiction franchises in modern history, much less tackle them back-to-back. Myself, I’ve loved Star Wars since the opening credits crawled across my screen for the first time, while I never quite saw the appeal in Star Trek (go ahead Trekkies, have at me). However, J.J. Abrams won me over with his 2009 reboot and I’ve been eagerly anticipating the sequel ever since. As it turns out, my enthusiasm was well-founded. Darkness is my favorite movie of the year so far and now I’m more eager than ever to see what Abrams can accomplish with Star Wars, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it (only 2 more years!). Minor spoilers below. 

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When J.J. Abrams Made Star Trek Mainstream

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Before 2009, Star Trek was about as cool and hip as a pair of men’s jorts or New Balance sneakers. It wasn’t something you admitted to liking if you ever wanted to get lucky with a girl. As a wrestling fan, I can identify with this. And like wrestling, Trek has a massive cult following of fans who may be unlucky in love but damn it, they are passionate about it and that’s never going to change.

Then J.J. Abrams showed up and made Star Trek… cool? A lot of people who normally wouldn’t have given Trek the time of day, including yours truly, found themselves completely immersed in Abrams’ 2009 reboot of the iconic nerd franchise. This accomplished two things: 1) It established Abrams as one of the most reliable blockbuster directors in the game and 2) Forever earned him the ire of hardcore Trekkies who resented him for altering something they loved in order to make it more accessible to general audiences.

To those Trekkies, I’d like to respectfully request that you give Abrams a break. He gifted us an entertaining movie series that is still going strong to this day and you guys still have all the old films and TV episodes to cherish and worship. Don’t you see? This was a win for all of us!

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The Sandlot: When It was Cool to Play Outside

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This Pokemon Go thing is a real trip. It’s damn near caused as much of a stir as Pokemon did about 20 years ago when it first burst onto the scene. People are going out of their way to catch as many of these things as they can. As a result, they are spending more time outside, enjoying a healthy competition with their friends and are making new ones along the way. And when you get right down to it, that’s more or less what The Sandlot is all about.

Tonight, Film on the Rocks will be playing The Sandlot and making sure that all of the 90’s kids in attendance get the nostalgia trip that they are looking for. And yes, I will be among those frantically scurrying around in order to catch more Pokemon.

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The Big Short: A Scary Realization

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When I was first hired on as an analyst at a top 20 bank I was buried in nondisclosure agreements, inter-company ethic codes and complicated rules regarding my personal investments. In addition I was drowning in banking terms like leveraged leases, basis points, normalized yields, and derivative swaps.

I felt overwhelmed and exhausted with all this new information and all of these rules and regulations. I couldn’t help but wonder how a seemingly simple idea like banking (a business that holds people’s money and uses it to create loans for other people) could be so…complicated.

As any good employee does, I decided to do some research on my own time. Where did I turn for knowledge on the in’s and out’s of the banking industry? Why Hollywood of course!

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The Jungle Book: Much More than a Bare Necessity

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One thing that irks me about Hollywood these days is the overwhelming amount of remakes that are churned out. We have become so inundated by reboots, retellings and retries that we sort of just accept it as the way things are. When a guy like Michael Bay sets out to ruin our childhood by butchering Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, we don’t get that upset about it because we expect to be disappointed.

My girlfriend tells me that I’m too cynical when it comes to movies and that is probably true to an extent, but often times these remakes are shameless cash grabs. There’s no effort to honor the spirit of the original story or to enhance it in any way, because they know people will go see it regardless of how much care is taken to produce a quality film. The same could’ve easily been true for The Jungle Book and considering how difficult it must be to create a successful live-action adaptation of a boy hanging out with talking animals, I’d say my skeptical attitude was well-founded.

Which is why it thrills me to admit that The Jungle Book is the rare remake that put all of those fears to rest. There’s no better feeling than to brace yourself for the worst and then receive the best.

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Batman vs Spider-Man

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You read that title right. Between Batman V Superman and Civil War, it’s the year of the superhero fight. Naturally we wanted to cash in on this topic and pit Kevin’s favorite superhero (your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man) against Jesse’s favorite superhero (the hero Gotham deserves, Batman).

Just to clarify, we are not going to discuss which superhero would win in a fight because it would totally be the one with ACTUAL superhero powers because that’s mostly impossible to know. Instead we are debating why we believe our superhero to be superior entertainment wise. We can argue about comics, movies, and shitty Adam West TV series or about origin story, abilities and costumes. Whatever we want, just not about an actual battle.

So strap on your utility belt, grab your web slingers and take a jump to see who we crown the ultimate superhero.

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Step Up: A Relationship Rite of Passage

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This probably struck you as an interesting choice for a movie review before you even started reading it, so allow me to put it into context for you. I’m probably not the first guy who was asked to watch Step Up with his girlfriend, but I was probably one of the first guys who had to convince his girlfriend to watch Step Up with him.

My girlfriend is nice enough to watch a lot of comic book films and other nerdy stuff with me, so it’s only fair that I get enthusiastic about watching chick flicks with her. And maybe it’s because the reputation of this series has gone down the toilet thanks to numerous straight to DVD sequels, but she was REALLY hesitant to watch this with me. She was convinced that I would hate it. It took some prodding, but eventually she agreed. We watched it and the following exchange ensued.

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