Caught 2 movies last night at the local drive-in (yes, these still exist!) and another this morning, so got to get caught up!

I had high hopes for Godzilla, though I’m not sure why. Maybe I was ready for a good sci-fi film, unfortunately this was a big letdown. The acting is pretty bad, with very over-dramatic pauses, rough dialogue and even worse delivery of the rough dialogue. There are more scenes in the movie where the music quits, everyone gets quiet, and something moves in the background/foreground/off-camera than probably any other movie made in the last 50 years. I’m sad to say this movie feels like one of the old English-dubbed Japanese disaster movies that are always ridiculed, only with big budget special effects. I know a few people that roll their eyes a lot. If they saw this movie, they’d strain the muscles around their eyes by the end of this film.

After a string of decent, so-so, and bad movies lately, Million Dollar Arm finally moved me. It is the based-on-a-true story of a sports agent that starts a reality show in India to find baseball talent. In a time when baseball players are being scouted in most big market countries around the world, agent J.B. Bernstein, played here by John Hamm, looks to India, one of most populated countries in the world that, to this point, has not been scouted. He realizes the sheer number of an untapped fan base there, and sets out to find India’s first major league baseball player. While the trip starts out all about the promise of millions in the future, it becomes something much more.

This is a very heart warming story. John Hamm is fantastic as the cold, business-only sports agent. He treats the 2 teenagers from India as his meal ticket, until his neighbor (played by the up-and-comer Lake Bell, definitely check out last year’s indie surprise In a World, well worth it) makes him realize they are more than just the hope of financial success. They are kids, thousands of miles from the only home they ever knew, in a different and scary environment. The ending left several people in the audience sniffling and reaching for a tissue. It is a very warm movie, great for viewers of all ages. Unfortunately it opened against Godzilla and did not do well this weekend, though with a great Cinemascore (A-) it will probably hold for several weeks longer than expected. This one is well worth a trip to the theater or a family night rental.

Neighbors just killed it in the theaters this past weekend. It came in with a bunch of hype and looked genuinely funny in the previews. While certain segments were definitely laugh-out-loud funny, overall it didn’t hold up to what it could have been.

Initial estimates are saying the movie did about $51 million in its first weekend, which is huge for an “original” (non sequel, etc.) R-rated comedy. The premise looked great, a college frat house moves next door to first-time homeowners, adjusting themselves to feeling older as they now have a house and a new baby, and they are trying to reconcile being responsible versus trying to stay young and hip, while feuding with their new neighbors. It has plenty of star power. Seth Rogen is coming off This Is the End, a huge semi-surprise hit last year, Rose Byrne showed she can do the comedy thing in Bridesmaids, and Zac Efron surely brought out the under-25 crowd. Much of the comedy in the film is Rogen-style dialogue, in his usual unscripted-like feel (not sure how much was or wasn’t in this movie). However, it didn’t always work, I definitely felt like there were less laughs than there should have been. And the movie got a B on Cinemascore (ratings of pure word-of-mouth movie goers, not critic reviews), which is not good. I think Neighbors is an ok film, though it does get a little weird in the last 20 minutes when it drops the comedy and tries to inject a real story arc where one didn’t exist before.

If you enjoy Rogen’s style, you’ll at least enjoy most of this film, and if nothing else it is good raunchy adult humor that you can lose yourself in for an hour and a half.

Spiderman seems to be in a tailspin. Though the movies keep making money, each successive one makes less (at least domestically, this newest one looks like it will do very well overseas). The movies aren’t bad, and even the newest one, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, is a decent movie for action super-hero lovers, but I think people are getting tired of them. After all, if you count the original trilogy and the reboots, this is the fifth in the last 12 years. Spidey’s newest adventure attempts to be grander than any previous one, but in the end it feels a little tired.

I left the theater last night thinking it was a really good movie, but the morning after I’m left thinking it was just ok. Spiderman doesn’t have any new tricks up his sleeve to show the audience. The bad guys are pretty one dimensional with no great sweeping plots or intricate dastardly plans. There is a heart-wrenching scene but it was expected and thus even that was a bit of a letdown. I’m a big fan of the Avengers film series over the last few years, because they keep events gripping and on such a large scale (though even there, I’m a bit tired of Iron Man). Don’t get me wrong, Spiderman 2 is a fun adventure. Marvel just may want to take a break and let Spiderman get some rest.

As a side note, I can understand why the filmmakers decided to cut Shailene Woodley’s filmed parts from the final release. She was to play Mary Jane, Spiderman’s longtime girlfriend in the comics. The director and team decided they didn’t want to muddle the movie and the gripping scenes between Spiderman and his old flame Gwen (played by Emma Stone), but I think it was a mistake. Woodley’s star is sharply on the rise between last year’s critically acclaimed The Spectacular Now, and the upcoming The Fault in Our Stars, in which she seems to be getting a lot of early buzz. Not sure if she’ll stick around for the next Spiderman film, and if they make another soon, they could use the star power.

The Other Woman is the story of when a jilted wife finds her husband’s mistresses, and they all become fast friends and plot his downfall. It sounds hokey and parts of this film certainly are, but it is also laugh-out-loud funny at times.

Obviously if you’ve seen the trailer for this, you know the story, and there are no surprises here, no great sweeping plot twists. It is straight forward, but what makes it work is the dialogue between the women. Though admittedly I’m a little tired of Leslie Mann (I’m pretty sure she speaks the same way, and exhibits the same mannerisms in every film she’s ever been in), her back-and-forth with Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton is funny. There are a couple nice lean-on-me scenes too, for Leslie’s character in particular, since it is her husband and he has always controlled everything and she’s feeling lost. Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t anything deeper than a kiddie pool in this movie, but it is (a little) more than just laughs.

The movie does slow towards the last third of the film, when the plot actually starts advancing and the laughs don’t come as often, and the ending is pretty rough even for die-hard chick flick movie goers, but there are definitely worse comedies to spend some time on.

Wanted to see Paul Walker’s last completed film go out with a bang (the next Fast & Furious film was unfinished at the time of his death, his brothers will be standing in to complete his role), but unfortunately Brick Mansions isn’t all that good. It is a remake of French film District 13, and brings over the star of that movie David Belle, one of the founders of the parkour discipline. Because of that, the action scenes involving Belle are pretty spectacular, but the movie as a whole is flat, shallow, and forgettable.

Taking place in the near-future, Walker plays an undercover cop who has made it his goal to take down the big drug lords of Detroit. His biggest target lives in Brick Mansions, an area of Detroit that has been walled off from the its surroundings due to its terrible drug and crime problems. It has now become a city within a city, and people can only enter or leave at military controlled checkpoints. It all sounds like a grand premise, but the movie comes out predictable and stale. The bad guys are super bad until all of a sudden they aren’t anymore, and then they are super good. When Belle teams up with Walker, he even makes a joke how this has become a buddy cop movie, and from then on it pretty much is, with every stereotype you can think of. The “surprise” ending takes too long to come to a climax, you just see it coming like a train that you can’t step away from. The Fast & Furious films are pretty mindless action flicks, but at least they have a tightness to them that is engaging and fun to watch. Unfortunately for Brick Mansions, the only thing grabbing was the memorial to Walker at the start of the credits.

I’m a bit of an animal lover. Always had dogs in our house growing up, though we can’t anymore due to my wife’s allergies. About 8 or 9 years ago my wife signed me up as a “zoo parent” to a grizzly and we’ve been contributing to his care at the local zoo ever since (as well as other animals here and there over the years, they are our “children”). So of course we were going to see Disneynature’s Bears when it came out.

This isn’t a film for everyone, obviously. It is a story/documentary about a new mother bear and her two cubs in their first summer together in the Alaskan mountains. It shows the dangers they live with on a daily basis from wolves, other bears, and of course starvation if food gets scarce. Narrated wonderfully by John C. Reilly, it paints an accurate portrayal while infusing some humor to elicit a chuckle here and there. It’s a short film at 78 minutes, so if you love animals, bears, or just wildlife in general, it’s a great way to kill an hour.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m seeing the same movie critics are. Sometimes highly touted flicks are total busts for me (I’m looking at you Wolf of Wall Street – DiCaprio was stellar but the movie… not so much), and in others, the reverse is true. Transcendence is one. I almost skipped this one because it is getting only middling reviews. I’m glad I took a chance on it, this is a fantastic film. While there are points in which the viewer is asked to take a pretty big leap of faith, it is a thought provoking and emotionally intense film.

I’ll say from the beginning, this is not a film for the masses. Though the visuals are great (the director is Wally Pfister, known more as the long-time cinematographer collaborator with Christopher Nolan, through Inception, his Batman films, and all the way back to his early Memento days), it isn’t a high-octane action movie. It is slow moving and can be wordy at times. I liken it to Spielberg’s A.I., which I also loved. When A.I. came out, it was not well received and did not do well here in the USA, only international tickets (rare when this movie was released in 2001) saved it from a total bomb. But it was an emotionally gripping movie, and I felt the same things in Transcendence.

The movie takes place in the near future when labs around the world are about to go online with a true artificially built intelligence. Things come crashing down when a terrorist group afraid of what this means for humanity decides to take it down and all the scientists involved with it. When one of the leads (played by Johnny Depp) is near death, his wife and friend upload his consciousness to a computer, thus making him the first fully aware A.I. For the rest of the film, you are left wondering if this is really the former human making decisions and only pretending at emotion, or if he is still “alive” inside the computer, as he makes newer and faster discoveries in science and medicine. You are not fully sure of this, and of his final intentions, until the very end of the film.

Sometimes I just want a pure action film and I don’t want to think, but other times I’m in for something that will make me pause and consider some “what ifs.” In this movie, these include what will a person do for the love of another, what is our responsibility to our planet, where will our continuing advancement of technology take us. When A.I. came out in 2001 it was not a success, but over the years people have warmed up to it. Perhaps Transcendence will find new life later as well.

Heaven is for Real is a based-on-a-true story of a little boy, Colton, who has a near-death experience at the age of 4. Upon leaving the hospital, he starts talking about things that he shouldn’t have known, and says he visited Heaven and met Jesus. But more than that, it is the story of faith and accepting those things we cannot explain.

The boy’s father, Todd, is played by Greg Kinnear, who is absolutely fantastic in this movie. He plays the pastor of a church, a man whom the local community loves. But when Colton starts talking about Heaven as a real place to which he has been, Todd is faced with a crisis of faith. For this pastor, talking about what comes after life has always been sort of metaphorical, as it is probably for most of the world’s population that believes in some sort of afterlife. He wants to believe his son, but everyone around him tells him this is not possible. The boy did not “die” on the operating table (his heart or brain never stopped), and non-believers give him plenty of explanations. Even his own church and close family is uncomfortable with the discussion, all for different reasons. In the end, Todd has to decide that his entire life has been built on faith, and since he will never have the concrete answers he wants, he has to be content that something happened that he cannot explain.

The movie is good, and I think it can be enjoyed whether you are Christian or not. The end is a little too touchy-feely. They try to wrap everything up in a happy bow, and for a movie that the main premise is having to accept things as they are, the last 5 minutes felt a little out of character. But Kinnear’s performance as a struggling man of faith is outstanding (there’s a scene in the beginning where he tries to reason with God as I’m sure most of us have at some point have that is chilling). Well worth a view.

I’m a bit of a sports nut. I know the rules to all the major sports, and can spout off frivolous stats (especially baseball of course, I’m a St. Louisan) with the best of them. I have a soft spot for sports films. Say what you want about a lot of Kevin Costner’s films (see my review of 3 Days to Kill earlier this year), but he knows how to make a sports film. I love Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, and yes, even For Love of the Game. I loved Draft Day too.

As the title states, this is the story of a single day in the life of a football GM on the day of the NFL draft. Costner plays the GM of the Browns, a long suffering franchise seemingly always on the cusp of just about ready to break out, but never finding their stride. What I like about Costner’s other sports films, and there is plenty of in this film too, is they have heart. It’s not just a tale of events, they pull you in and you root for the characters to excel. At different points in this movie, you don’t know if things are going to go right for the team or not, but in the end you are definitely satisfied with the result. I think this is a great stereotypical “guy’s film” since it is heavy sports related, but I think it’s a movie my wife would enjoy too.