Maleficent is the other side of the story of Sleeping Beauty. When I was a kid, good guys were good and bad guys were bad, and there wasn’t much in between. Even kids movies these days often offer more shades of grey, and such is Maleficent. In this movie, you see what drove her to darkness to become the villain we all know from the story, but also how she came to redeem herself later. Like most people, her story is much more complicated than a simple evil witch intent on destroying all that is good.

The initial previews for this movie (from quite awhile ago, Disney’s been hyping this one for some time) made the movie seem darker than it ended up being. When the final rating came down as only PG, I knew it would be more kid friendly than initially expected. And I think it does make a good kid’s movie. It offers something for adults, including spectacular visuals and decent acting by Angelina Jolie, but there isn’t too much substance here. However, kids should love it, and the younger in the crowd did ooh and awe throughout the film. The ending is a little predictable, but like most Disney movies, I think there is enough here that kids will want to see it again and again. For me, once is enough.

It’s not hard to see Jon Favreau’s personal career arc mirrored in the movie Chef. He started out making small indie films like Swingers and Made, which were very highly thought of. As the budgets got bigger, so did the headaches and tensions with studios, until after doing Iron Man and its first sequel, he was passed over both The Avengers and Iron Man 3, something that had to sting. In Chef, he successfully returns to his roots.

Chef is about, well, a chef. After a sterling food critic’s review early in his career, Favreau’s character relatively quickly moves up to a head chef position in a posh restaurant in L.A. There he has to sacrifice his planned menu to appease the “exec” (restaurant owner) and the end result is a catastrophe for all involved. Now jobless, broke, and with a son he has ignored over the past 10 years to further his career, he ends up back where he started. Of course, this is where he finds true happiness, and gets to become a better person, a better father, and a better chef along the way.

This movie really has it all. It is funny, provoking, and it has a lot of heart too. It won’t be a big blockbuster, but at this point in Favreau’s career, I don’t think he wants it to be. After making the big movies and raking in the dough with them, I think he just wanted to make this one for himself. Moviegoers should be glad he did.

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.