The Out-of-Focus Guy’s blog

Wow, another post-apocalyptic movie.  "The Road" was directed by John Hillcoat and stars Viggo Mortensen.  I thought this film was good, a solid B/B+.  Mortensen plays a survivor of an apocalyptic event.  They don't specify what that event was, and it's not important to the story.  Mortensen's character is traveling south with his son in hopes of finding a better environment.  The son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, has more humanity left than his father.  He is willing to help fellow survivors, while his father no longer trusts anyone in order to protect his son and survive.  This is a bleak, pessimistic film.  The father teaches his son to commit suicide if he is unable to protect him any longer.  There are bands of rapists, murderers, and cannibals in this world, as food is scarce and society was destroyed by the apocalyptic event.  Throughout the film, Mortensen's character dreams of his wife (played by Charlize Theron) so you can see how survival has changed him.  I have not read the book by Cormac McCarthy so my opinion is based entirely on the movie.  Other actors in the film are Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce, and both are fine.  The environment shown feels realistic.  The acting and directing are good.  In some ways, this film resembles "Road to Perdition", where a father protects his son and also raises his son to be better than he is.

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Okay, "2012" isn't art.  But what it is is a fun movie that succeeds in the disaster movie cliches it wallows in.  I would rate it as a B.  The plot is basic: a government scientist (played by Chiwetal Ejiofor) is alerted by a colleague from India that the earth's core is starting to heat up and will cause a disaster of apocalyptic proportions.  The script for this movie steals liberally from all of your favorite disaster movies: saving the "lower class" people from death (from "Titanic"); navigating the bowels of a ship to save people (from "The Poseidon Adventure"); the broken family on the run where survival brings them back together (from "War of the Worlds"); and the person in power revealing himself to be a selfish coward (also from "Titanic").  The cast (John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Tom McCarthy, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson, Oliver Platt, and Thandie Newton) all do an okay job with the material they were given.  The directing by Roland Emmerich is very good and the special effects are terrific.  As long as you're not expecting this movie to contend for an Oscar, you should have a good time.

I don't know whether "The Box" is necessarily good or not.  That requires me to fully understand the explanation for what's going on, which I don't.  It is interesting, which is why I would grade it as a B-/C+.  The short story on which this movie was based was written by Richard Matheson, who wrote many episodes of the science fiction anthology TV show "The Twilight Zone."  The adaptation by director Richard Kelly makes it feel like a mashup of "The X-Files" and a movie by David Lynch.  The plot is that a couple with money problems (played by Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) is presented with a moral dilemma: For $1 million dollars, push a button on a box and kill a stranger.  In a "Twilight Zone" story, the revelation of who the person killed was usually the payoff.  In this movie, it's a weird conspiracy movie related to the Viking Mars landing in 1976.  As expected, the button is pushed, and the couple has to deal with the consequences.  Frank Langella plays the man who presents the couple with the box and he has a deep, dark secret.  One problem with this movie is that the screenwriter wants to explain things when leaving some things as a mystery may be better for the story.  The acting is fine by all around and the directing was okay.  This movie left me scratching my head, as did Lynch's "Mulholland Drive".  It's not nearly as wacky as "Mulholland Drive", but it's still a bit strange.  See this at your own risk.

Well, after tonight's game, the New York Yankees have the World Series pretty much locked up.  Amazing what over $200 million of talent can buy you...  To me, the Yankees are emblematic of what is wrong with baseball: It's not a level playing field.  Teams like the Oakland A's, the Kansas City Royals and the Pittsburgh Pirates are basically farm teams for the rich teams.  Poorer teams like the Minnesota Twins can sneak into the playoffs (and sometimes the World Series), but they can never win.  The last five years have the following teams as champions: 2009 - New York Yankees (more than likely), 2008 - Philadelphia Phillies, 2007 - Boston Red Sox, 2006 - St. Louis Cardinals, 2005 - Chicago White Sox.  None of these teams are among the bottom of the league in terms of salaries and most are backed by wealthy owners.  The season is over before it begins for most teams.  The Yankees bought one of the best pitchers in baseball (C.C. Sabathia) and one of the best hitters (Mark Teixeira).  They already had an all-star team on the left side of the infield (Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter) and now they have the right mix of veteran players to win the World Series finally after trying to buy it for the last decade.  If they don't win it, another wealthy team will.

Some thoughts on College Football at about the midway point:

• My alma mater, Cal, is having a good season (record-wise), if a bit disappointing.  Our record (5-2) is more reflective of playing weaker opponents at the beginning of the season than true excellence.  Our two losses were blowouts to Oregon and USC, arguably the two best teams in the conference. Our true tests are against teams at about the same level as Cal: Oregon State, Arizona, Stanford and Washington. If we can beat some of these teams, it will be a good season.
• The Pac-10 title will likely go to Oregon.  After laying an egg against Boise State, Oregon has looked especially dominant when Jeremiah Masoli is their quarterback.  When Nate Costa is their quarterback, they are mediocre.  USC is very good, but they look beatable.  I don't believe in Arizona yet.
  
• I don't know who the best team in the country is, but I want to see BCS-buster Cincinnati in the mix.  They look better and better every week.  Florida and Alabama look vulnerable, but Texas seems to be improving its play.
• The Heisman Trophy looks like it might be coming down to Florida QB Tim Tebow or Alabama RB Mark Ingram.  I'm not sold on any of the other candidates.  Ingram might be leading, as people see Tebow stumbling a bit or just tire of his constant media overload.
• I still want a college football playoff, but would like it limited to 4 teams in the beginning.  Right now, I would have Alabama, Florida, Texas and Cincinnati in the mix.  I think if you start there, you can get people excited about expanding the field later.
  

The LeBron James high school documentary, "More Than A Game" was pretty good.  Overall, I would rate it as a B. This film details the high school basketball career of LeBron James and his teammates at Saint Vincent-Saint Mary's High School in Akron, Ohio.  It's similar, in some respects, to "Hoop Dreams", but this film focuses mainly on the players and coaches on the team rather than just the lives of two players.  LeBron is an equal co-star with all of the other players on the team, even though he clearly outshines everyone in talent.  This is also a story about the friendship between the players as well as the relationship between the coach and his son, a guard on the team.  It's interesting to watch the players grow up and I'm glad the story mainly focuses on the basketball and less on the life stories of the players.  Too often, documentaries like these want to portray a "warts-and-all" aspect of the players, which tends to make them less sympathetic.  This movie does not dig too deep, so it doesn't detract from the kids' accomplishments. Because the film incorporates some home movies, some of the cinematography is not great.  I think the director (Kristopher Belman) did a fine job.

Unfortunately, "Couples Retreat"is only a mildly humorous film, where star and co-writer Vince Vaughn gets all of the good lines.  I would rate this movie as a C.  Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Jason Bateman and Faizon Love play four friends who go with their wives to a tropical island for a "Couples Retreat" that is intended to be a therapy session for struggling marriages.  The movie fails to explain why these four men are all friends or even what these people do for a living (save for Vaughn's character, who sells video games).  There are a few laughs here and there, with one scene with a yoga instructor being the highlight of the movie.  Malin Akerman (as Vaughn's wife), Kristen Bell (as Bateman's wife), Kristin Davis (as Favreau's wife) and Kali Hawk as Love's new, much younger girlfriend round out the cast.  The various therapy sessions are somewhat funny, but more laughs could have been milked out of the situations.  Another problem with the movie is that the female characters are thinly drawn and don't do much to contribute to the humor. Former child actor Peter Billingsley (Ralphie Parker in "A Christmas Story") does an adequate job directing, but the script needed a lot more work.  Overall, only a trifle of a film.

Director Michael Moore strikes again.  This time, his target is Wall Street and the whole system of capitalism.  "Capitalism: A Love Story" is not a bad movie, but Moore is a bit scatter shot in his criticism of capitalism.  I would rate it as a B-.  My biggest problem with this movie is that I don't believe that he is correct.  The system of capitalism is not by itself corrupt; the people running the system are corrupt. His thesis seems to state that capitalism needs to be abandoned and that socialism needs to be adopted in its stead.  Fundamentally, I think the biggest problem with capitalism is a lack of business ethics and the idea of fairness in competition.  Moore has some good stories, in particular one about Franklin Roosevelt and the proposed second Bill of Rights. His targets range from the large investment banks to insurance companies to George W. Bush to Ronald Reagan to Christopher Dodd.  As usual, he effectively uses humor to illustrate some inflammatory points.  As a liberal, I agree with the message, even if it isn't always effectively delivered.

"Zombieland" is one of the few horror comedies.  The movie touted as one of the best, "Shaun of the Dead", was okay.  So is "Zombieland".  Overall, I would rate it as a B.  It's fun, the characters are all acceptable, and the directing is fine.  Unfortunately, it never really rises above being just okay.  In this film, a virus has broken out and spread throughout the country, leaving the infected as zombies who want to eat the remaining humans.  Jesse Eisenberg is Columbus (all of the characters are named after their hometowns, so they don't feel badly about having to kill someone they don't know as well), who has developed a list of rules he uses to survive.  The rules are visually shown and it's a lot of fun.  Along the way, he meets Tallahassee (played by Woody Harrelson), a redneck who takes pleasure in killing zombies in creative ways.  The two of them find con artist sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who keep robbing Columbus and Tallahassee throughout the movie. Columbus is a loner by nature, which has helped him to survive.  Naturally, meeting these people will help him get out of his shell and develop a sort of extended family.  There's a cute sequence where they go to Hollywood and meet a celebrity who is one of the few surviving actors.  It could have been a funnier satire than it was. To me, this film was better than "Shaun of the Dead", but it still doesn't become an instant classic.