NOW YOU SEE ME = Cinematic Magic?

Hello, WORLD!!! Smokkee here, continuing to play catch up on all of my movie reviews. If you know anything about me, you know I've been disappointed by most of the movies that have been released in 2013. There's only a handful that truly stand out with STOKER being my favorite 2013 movie up to this point. I can now add  NOW YOU SEE ME to this list too. I don't know what it is about magician movies but most are pretty good. THE ILLUSIONIST starring Edward Norton and THE PRESTIGE with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale were both great.

NYSM starts off by introducing us to four magicians: Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt McKinley (Eisenberg's ZOMBIELAND co-star Woody Harrelson), Henly Reeves (Isla Fisher) & Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) showcasing their unique brands of illusion. Each receives a mysterious Tarot card that leads them to an apartment and allows them to meet each other, although there's some kind of past history between Daniel and Henly. After their initial meeting, the film fast forwards to one year later in Las Vegas where the 4 performers are headlining a show as the Four Horsemen, with their benefactor Arthur Tressler, the man who sponsors the quartet, watching from the audience. Tresslrr is played by Michael Caine, who's just as great as always here. And also in the audience is Thaddeus Bradley, a former magician who may hold the key to the grand finale of the Horseman's show. Bradley is played with a smarmy to a tee attitude by Morgan Freeman. The grand finale to end this show, which we find out is the first of three, is they rob a bank...in Paris! Interesting, right?

 Enter FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) who is teamed up with Interpol agent Alma Vargas to figure out how they do it and what could they possibly do for encores at their next two shows... 

I loved this movie until the end. I walked out the theater still liking this movie but not as much as I thought I would when it ended. Also, you never really get to know any of these characters nor do you care about them. For one brief second, this movie appeared to be heading to greatness but that too was an illusion. Not bad but coulda been way better. It's definitely worth viewing.

B-

Later, WORLD!

THE ICEMAN: He Comeths But He Looks Awfully Familiar

        Hello, WORLD!!! Smokkee here, talking about a film from a genre that I thought would never get old. That film is THE ICEMAN, the genre is gangster movies, and that assumption was dead wrong.

        Based on a true story, THE ICEMAN tells the tale of Richard Kuklinski (played by Michael Shannon), who was just a porn distributor with a bad temper until he met a goodfella by the name of  Roy DeMeo (played here by the goodfella Ray Liotta) who comes to him to kill him for a bad video deal but instead notices that Kuklinski is a steely type of fellow. "He's as cold as ice." DeMeo observes at one point in the movie, made clear by the fact that DeMeo has a gun looking squarely in Kuklinski's face at the time.  Instead of killing him, DeMeo gives Rich a better money making opportunity as a hitman for DeMeo's mafia family.

        Speaking of family, Rich is totally devoted to his wife Deborah (Wynona Ryder, acting a bit rusty here) and later, their two daughters. He has hidden the fact that he's a hitman from her and their friends. Hell, he even hid the fact that he was a pornographer from her too. Soon separating the two Richs are as hard for Kuklinski to do as is socializing and everything comes crashing down. The only guy he really could talk to is another hitman who names himself after the icecream truck he works out of: Mr Softee (Chris Evans, one of the few acting bright spots in this movie).

         ICEMAN may have seemed like a good idea for movie. According to his Wikipedia page, Kuklinski is said to have killed anywhere from 100 to 250 people between 1948 and 1986. In most cases I'd say yes, make a movie about that guy. This movie isn't bad however, it's just a rehash of almost every gangster movie cliche you've ever seen, from THE GODFATHER to SCARFACE even to Ray Liotta's riveting turn in GOODFELLAS. The question is if you've never seen any of those movies would I recommend this movie to you. I don't think I could. Besides Liotta and Evans the rest of the cast doesn't do much to make this story compelling or to make their character stand out. Not totally surprising, though I did expect a better showing from Shannon but he didn't have much to do but glare most of the time. Now name me a gangster movie that didn't have a gangster doing that. Go ahead. I'll wait. D



  

THIS IS THE END - A Decent Way To Go

       Hello, WORLD!! Smokkee here, for now. With all the apocalyptic movies that have been coming out lately, it almost seems like the end is nigh. But who knows right? Actually, if MELANCHOLIA, SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, ZOMBIELAND, and WARM BODIES are any

indication, maybe it won't be so bad after all. I loved those movies & I'm half-halfheartedly adding THIS IS THE END to that group. It's not quite as good as the former movies but it still manages to entertain.

       THE END starts out with Seth Rogan meeting his friend Jay Baruchel at LAX. Seth is played by a Seth Rogan and every almost every other actor in this movie is playing a version of themselves as well. It's clear early on that there's gonna be tons of self depreciating humor in this movie when the in the opening scene alone Seth gets ridiculed for the GREEN HORNET, his laugh, and the fact that he plays the same character in every movie. Almost everybody has a little fun with themselves and there's tons of stars in this movie, from Rihanna to Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse. I won't reveal everbody though because part of the beauty of star cameos is finding out the that star was in the movie in the first place. One star's cameo towards the end of this movie in particular and the manner in which he appears is beyond insane. 

        Jay is out in LA for to visit but makes it clear from the onset that he hates LA and LA-ish people. He just wants to hang out with his buddy Seth. Seth has a better idea: he talks Jay into attending a party hosted

Michael Cera's cameo almost steals this whole movie.

by James Franco at his new house with people like Franco, Jonah Hill, & Michael Cera (who makes every scene he's in hysterical) in attendance. LA-ish people.

         Needing some air from all of the LA-ness, Jay heads for a convience store with Seth in tow and that's when all hell breaks loose. Literally? Maybe... Anyway, when all is said and done, only Seth, Jay, James, Jonah, and Craig Robinson are still alive at Franco's house. The spend time trying to make sense of it all in between making movies like PINEAPPLE EXPRESS 2 to entertain themselves.
        
         If you loved any of the earlier Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg movies, you'll love this one too I suppose. I liked this movie enough to recommend it but I did have some problems with it. First, at 106 minutes, this movie last entirely too long. It's premise starts to wear thin towards the middle. And it has a strong sexual innuendo that appears early in the movie and stays throughout the movie but doesn't quite provide the chuckles I imagine the writers thought it would. This movie isn't super bad but it isn't SUPERBAD either. Here's hoping Simon Pegg's similiar themed comedy AT WORLD'S END due out this August is as good or better than this.  C+  

DISCONNECT: Maybe One Of The Most Important Films You'll See This Year.

Hello, WORLD!! Smokkee Singleton here. Yep, It's been a long time. I got TONS of reviews for you but I'm trying to play catch up here so I'll try to stick to the movies that's out now and movies that you may have missed but I've been too busy on The Simpsons: Tapped Out (Yes, I've become addicted to that freaking game!) to write. I'm gonna kick my return to movie reviewing off with what I feel is one of the most important movies I've seen this year.


DISCONNECT stars ensemble cast in various stories about socializing in this age of technology we're in. One narrative features Jason Bateman acting as what is fast becoming his type of character as Rich, a family man that doesn't spend nearly as much time with his wife Lydia (Hope Davis) or their kids (Haley Ramm and Jonah Bobo) as he does on a computer until a tragedy hits. How this tragedy comes about also causes a crisis between a father and son (Frank Grillo and Colin Ford). In another story Andrea Risebough plays an up-and-coming TV reporter who happens visits a mail escort site and lands a story with one such escort under the condition that he remains anonymous, that leads to a bigger opportunity....if she'll reveal her source. Lastly, in what to me is the center piece of this movie, Alexander Skarsgard and Paula Patton play the Hulls, a married couple who become victims of identity theft due to one or maybe more of their online activities, including online gambling and chatroom conversations. Their relationship is strained by their actions and because of Facebook and Twitter, their story is probably the most accessible and the most relative to our society.

Alexander Skarsgard and Paula Patton as the Hulls in DISCONNECT

The first thing that strikes you about this movie is how much it will remind you of CRASH. To put it mildly, this feels like a continuation of the tone of that earlier Oscar winning movie, with the racial issues replaced with modern day socializing issues. That said, director Henry Alex Rubin does a great job showing the connected world as we know it as well as highlighting the dangers of it as well. My only complaint is that this movie gets wrapped up nice and neat with no issue truly resolved or ended on bad terms. We all know life usually doesn't work that way. How many truly happy endings have there been? Still, because of the issues this movie addresses, I feel that this is a must see for anybody that uses a smart phone or a computer. Log off and check this movie out. B-     

IRON MAN 3 Goes The Distance

Hello, WORLD!! Smokkee here. Just got a chance to watch the last part of the IRON MAN movie trilogy. It certainly ended like the last chapter but we all know after the inevitable AVENGERS 2 there may be another solo outing for Tony Stark yet.

This movie starts with that Stark at a New Year's Eve party in 1999, years before he became the hero we know him as today. Accompanying Tony at this gathering is his date Dr Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) and his loyal bodyguard Happy (the first two IRON MAN movie's director Jon Favreau). Sneaking aboard their already crowded elevator is the slightly unsightly Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce, unrecognizable at first). He wants to offer Tony a chance to be part of his new company AIM and Tony plays a mean prank on him as a way of saying 'beat it'.

(SN: Interestingly enough I remember meeting Aldrich, Maya and Maya's invention, Extremis, during a period of time when I still read comic books on a regular basis but not in the capacity of how this movie portrays them.) 

Flash foward to the Iron Man Stark. How is Tony (Robert Downey Jr) these days anyway after the events of last summer? He doesn't appear to be too scarred by them but it's revealed early that he isn't the same. Of course he just met a god, a monster, a living legend from decades ago, not to mention an entire alien army. So nobody can blame him if he's not quite the same fun loving billionaire after all that. That entire experience haunts him. He starts to have panic attacks anytime somebody brings up the New York incident. So what does he do? He does what he does best: he works. He's become another type of Iron Man, one who just keeps going and going. He reveals he has barely slept since the event, dragging himself out of bed to work on, what else, improving his Iron Man techonology. In earlier scenes it appears his robotic assistant Jarvis (voiced by Paul Bettany) has more personality than the former fun loving Stark.

The one thing that he has going for him is the love of his best friend Pepper Potts (the always lovely Gweneth Paltrow). She has a meeting with a now handsome Killian (Pearce, now looking like Pearce) and she too rebuffs his offer, albeit not as cruelly as Stark. Meanwhile, Stark's friend Col. James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), still in possession of the War Machine outfit, now called Iron Patriot (Marvel Comics fans would remember that name too), is on the hunt per the POTUS for a terrorist called the Mandarian (Ben Kingsley, who should be arrested for stealing every scene he's in), the mastermind behind a series of bombings that is confusing the hell out of everybody because no bomb casings are recovered from the scenes of the crimes.  

This sets in motion a chain of events that will leave.... No since spoiling anything right?

You're just here to see if this movie works, right? It totally works! And the 3D for once doesn't take anything away from the great story telling. If I have any complaints, it's that IM# starts kinda slow but once it takes its foot off the brakes, you're in for one hell of a ride. Wanna talk about this movie with me? Find me on Twitter as @MrGBIZ or catch me on Bunch.com.





F  

Whodunnit? There's An App For That!

Hello, WORLD!! Smokkee Singleton here, back again after fighting a losing battle. As much as I love trying new apps, sometimes I have TOO much fun with them. One of my favorite genres of movies, books, and games is mysteries. I grew up reading Donald J Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown and Agatha Christie's Poirot and Miss Marples. I also maybe the only guy who thinks that Clue is better than Monopoly too.

I still love mysteries to this day. Some of the best mysteries these days can be found in video games. Square Inc even has a game coming out for the PC, the XBox 360 and the PS3 where you get to solve your own murder. Using that logic, I knew there had to be at least 1 good mystery smartphone app I could play but since I haven't found one in 5+ years I was starting to give up hope.

Til I found one. Then that one app opened a floodgate.

Turns out there's a slew of great apps for people like me. I've been totally distracted lately playing a few of them. The first mystery game that I played was Murder Room although the one I ran across first was Ellie.....Help Me Out Please, both created by ATEAM, Inc. I downloaded both at the same time.

That tablecloth will come in handy.

Murder Room (for Android & iOS) starts you off locked in a room with a another man who has a chainsaw wearing a pig's head and a little girl that, well, play the game and find out. The object is simply: try to escape the room and/or the chainsaw. The puzzles rang from simple to WTF but I got several bad endings before I got what is labeled a "True Ending" It kinda reminded me of the Choose Your Own Adventure books in that regard. Even more, after you get the "True Ending", you're then able to purchase "Another Room", it's the back story concerning the guy in the pig and the events that happen prior to the events in the first story (maybe). Both games are equally fun to play but the plot of both halves don't add up totally, a minor flaw.








Ellie (Android, iOS) has a different mystery to solve. You're watching a monitor of a room that has a the titular character locked inside. Your objective here is to help poor Ellie escape the room. I haven't finished playing this story yet, but I believe their is a 2nd mission here too. And it isn't as dark a story as Murder Room so the experience isn't quite as good to me as MR but it does have some tough puzzles to figure out nonetheless.

This dream sequence may hold the answer.

Now for my favorite mystery app so far, Who Is The Killer (Episode I) (Android, iOS)! In this game you're an unnamed detective that is the house guest of a lady named the Baroness. She's one of 7 other people who are there besides you. You're only here for 7 days but not without excitement. You see, every day you're there, somebody dies! Now, this game differs from the above two because THIS is my idea of a mystery. You have to obtain clues to figure out who the killer is and there's various ways to do this. One such way is to talk to the other guests. In this sense, it definitely reminds one of the board game Clue. There's several mini games, including dream sequences and anagram puzzles, that also help you solve the mystery. I think. I haven't solved it yet but wait til I get done with this review. Of course by this being Episode I it's safe to assume there's more chapters and so far I think it there is an Episode II and III already.

Like I said, I ran across TONS of these apps but a lot of them are those boring point n click games that make you sick after about 10 minutes of play. These games haven't made me nauseous yet though. Well, that's it for now WORLD.   Let me know if you found any of these games enjoyable.

As always, you can catch me on Twitter as @MrGBIZ.







   

SmokkeeOn... DJANGO UNCHAINED

Hello, WORLD!! Smokkee here to talk about Quentin Tarantino's latest masterpiece, DJANGO UNCHAINED. If you haven't seen this movie, stop reading this and go do so ASAP. If you want to read my review first, look up my Rotten Tomatoes or Gofobo review. I'm not reviewing it here. I want to discuss the controversy surrounding this movie.

And why it's unnecessary.

Now, unless you've been in a coma for the past 2 years, you gotta be lil familiar with this movie. Set in the days where slavery is alive and well in America, DJANGO tells the story of the titular slave (played by Jamie Foxx) who not only becomes a freeman thanks to a deal he makes with Dr Schultz, a bounty hunting dentist (played by the always great Christopher Waltz) , he also finds employment as a bounty hunter himself. Now free Jamie's Django sets about finding his beloved with Broomhilda (Foxx's costar in RAY Kerry Washington) and manages to find her at a plantation run by Lenardo DiCaprio.

I understand that race will always be a touchy subject but to be offended by any of that would be inane. First, if you had no idea that a movie about slavery would have racist undertones in it, then I'm not sure we should be having this conversation in the first place. Second, if you've seen Alex Haley's ROOTS, the movie many people consider THE movie on slavery, then nothing in this movie should have offended any African American. That movie was brutal in it's portrayal of slavery and it's language was just as harsh. There's no scene in DJANGO that can mirror any of Toby's torture scenes.

Stephen, the most racist character in DJANGO UNCHAINED.

Now Quentin Tarantino DOES seem to be infatuated w/the "N" word. He himself has used it on several occasions in almost every one of the pictures he made. So NOW it's offensive? It's a tad bit too late for that. Lastly, I want to point out Samuel L Jackson's Stephen character. If anything, the Caucasians in DJANGO use the 'n' word only because that's how they were brought up. What's the deal with Stephen then? He clearly is another freed slave, like Django, but his attitude is more like a slave-owners than any other slave owner in the movie. To make a movie about slavery and have the most racist character actually be an African American was genius! And it was fairly obvious genius at that, unlike given Schultz a first name of King (Dr King, get it?).    

Like I said, just some observations. It's a great movie, well worth watching. Only people with nothing else better to do with there tiem will find anything wrong with it. At least that's what I think. Let me know what you thought about it, WORLD. I'd love to hear from you.