Terrible Plan! Movie Reviews

What I liked: I went in with low expectations, for some reason I was thinking this was direct to DVD grade. It far exceeded my expectations. There were dinosaurs. The mathematician was back and he is funny. I liked the bearded paleontologist. From my brief stint in paleontology this seemed fairly accurate. The music was not as magical as the music from the first film but it did a good job playing with the melodies and themes from that sound track. Those are probably the two best parts: dinosaurs and funny dialogue but it made for a fun evening. What I didn't: As you can imagine everything about this movie is a bad plan. The mathematician sums it up the best with "worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas." Everything goes about as well as you expect it would if you were to airdrop a bunch of insane scientists on to an island inhabited with man eating dinosaurs and equipped with no fences. Especially if you were imagining this group running around and stealing bab...

What I liked: This was a good superhero movie. The franchise is doing a good job of building off to their own alternate reality that still acknowledges the old movies but is free to do its own thing. There were new mutants with new powers and old mutants with better powers than they had before. Some examples: Psylock is new, she is pretty cool she makes cool pink glowy weapons out of psychic energy. This isn't weird "please shoot me" black widow glow; this is " I will chop your arm off" pink glow. She was an impressive fighter and for being based on the 80's high hipped bathing suits, her costume was really cool. Phoenix/Jean Gray we have met before, but phoenix was always just weird and not cool. This phoenix was much more impressive, you get glimpses early in the movie that make you excited for when she will actually appear. Not only was there better powers the characters were funner too. Nightcrawler wears a thriller jacket and is entertaining. Just lik...

What I liked: This is really good for a third installment of a film that was planned as a stand alone. The first one was surprisingly funny; this one was much the same: surprising. I was impressed that they were still able to make me laugh. I was impressed that after making a cuddly panda the most powerful kungfu fighter in the animal world in the first movie, and the second, they were able to not only come up with increasingly strong villains to challenge the panda but also that they were able to have somewhere for the panda to grow as a character. There was some cool animation especially with some parts at the end with drawing with light. And the baby pandas are really cute. I liked the portion of Po trying to teach the Kung Fu class. I'm not sure that the panda army would be nearly as effective as the movie portrayed. Sometimes being you just  isn't  as good as being a ninja assassin, or Batman. But the only kids movie the would say that is one from Pixar so we can live wit...

What I liked: You might remember that one of my major problems with the last Avengers movie was that it wasn't funny. They tried to be funny and it didn't work. This time the funny is back. I laughed at the heroes, at their interactions. So well done, writing team. I really liked Spiderman. That's a sentence I never thought I would write. Spiderman was to Avengers 3 what Quicksilver was to X-Men 2: unexpectedly fun. One thing that helped Spiderman be successful in this movie was that since he was surrounded by grown-up heroes he was free to be a geeky teenager, something that is hard to do when you are the serious good guy in the film. I liked the characters who were carelessly introduced in the last Avengers film, they were coming into their own and seemed much more normal, you know in a flying, phasing, reality altering way. There were only two that I had to ask the person next to me who they were. They didn't know either (the person was clear on their own identity ...

What I liked: The Matrix was the movie during middle school. It’s pervasive influence has persisted ever since: you know we all took matrix pictures on the ironing boards in the MTC. Now that I’ve seen it I suddenly recognize many many more references to this film than I ever realized and I get them all. Not only that but this was the landmark film with the what is reality premise; Inception, Source Code, Minority Report, and Tron, all children of the Matrix. Matrix was also revolutionary in special effects and the dystopia which had been roughly the same since Planet of the Apes (given the current glut of dystopian films and fiction I don’t know if I actually appreciate this). I mention all of this because I have seen so many movies influenced by the Matrix that seeing their inspiration was pretty cool. For being almost 20 years old, the Matrix is a really good movie. The premise is cool, it would probably have been cooler if I didn’t already know from 20 years of spoilers what h...

   What I liked: The scenery as always is stunning. I would like to visit these places. It was nice for people in a kung fu movie to have a happy ending. Don’t worry many of them still died but I think that it’s nice the characters have some hope of surviving and finding fulfillment instead of being resigned to a miserable death or miserable life. While a staple of all kung fu movies, I always like it when they fly. Some of the jokes were funny. I laughed quite a few times actually and probably about half of them were in places the filmmakers intended. Overall, I think the moral may have been don’t be a mercenary, but I could be wrong.      What I didn’t: If you are expecting more of the same of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, that is not what you will get. I don’t know if that is good or bad for you but it is worth knowing. The fight scenes are less intricate, there are no subtitles and no chinese, the mood is less brooding, and the plot, well actually t...

     What I liked: I liked the rolly polly backpacks. I don’t really know that they had a purpose or would have been very good at whatever that purpose was, but they looked pretty cool. I liked the tiger lady’s afro. I liked that the main characters thought that effective disguises would be wearing cloaks with hoods. I mean can’t you even try the token haircut that all spies do? I like that despite the full blown war, oil spill, zombie apocalypse, lasers, and localized earthquake the subway system still seems to run with remarkable punctuality. I did really like that no one was fooled by Catnis’ terrible lying. “I have to tell you that I lied” “Yes we all know and have known the entire time” “really? I thought I was convincing.” “No, no you were not” I liked that some of the people that I was watching with were fooled by Catnis and the evil plots. Clearly they don’t watch enough spy movies.       What I didn’t:  Before I get into the cha...