Brain Tilt

Batman Begins (2005)

Christian Bale, Katie Holmes, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson

You know who is a pretty bad ass actor?? Christian Bale. He makes an excellent new Batman and I really like the direction they are taking with this series of movies. The first round (with Keaton as Batman) of Batman movies ended up being over the top cartoonish towards the end and basically sucked. The newer movies make it easier for me to suspend disbelief and enjoy the movie.

You know who is a horrible actress?? Katie Holmes. How the hell does this girl keep getting acting jobs?? She uses the George Clooney method of acting: play the same damn character in everything you do. She is basically Joey Potter in this movie. I fully expected her to tell Bale at the end of the movie that she loved him but was leaving him for Dawson or Pacey. Seriously, you make an ass load of money: SPEND SOME OF IT ON ACTING CLASSES!!!!

If you can get past the monumental task of tolerating Holmes, you’ll enjoy the first int he new Batman series.

The Ringer

Johnny Knoxville, Katherine Heigl

I must have been drunk when I added this to my queue. This is one of the worst movies I think I have ever seen. I would rather have spent the last 95 minutes being punched in the groin by a drunken clown than watching this movie.

Signs

Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin

I really think that Shyamalan set the bar too high with Sixth Sense. That was a GREAT movie. And it just seems that every movie since then can’t live up to what we expect from an M. Night movie.

Don’t get me wrong, Signs is not a bad movie. It’s just not a great movie. It’s a decent movie that has its good moments. I really like how you don’t ever really see the alien until about an hour in. Sure, you see a shadow here and there and the occasional leg among the corn stalks, but you don’t see the full thing until an hour into the movie. So you are left to your imagination until then.

I did have a few problems with the movie.

1) How many damn Culkin kids are there?? It seems like every movie with a child star includes a different Culkin kid. I guess mom and did figured that they needed a new gravy train when Macaulay was emancipated from his parents, so they decided to have more kids that would be actors. (For the record, including Rory, there are 7 Culkin kids…6 are actors)

2) The ending was cheesy. “Swing away Merrill .” Seriously?? You’re going to defeat an alien with a baseball bat?? I get what M. Night was trying to do, tying in the whole “everything happens for a reason” but I just don’t buy that a supposedly superior race of beings could be easily defeated with a baseball bat.

3) We are supposed to believe that these aliens are highly intelligent. They sent scouts down to earth to set up the crop circles to use as a communication system. They show their ships then make them invisible, to make the humans think that they are gone when they actually aren’t. What I don’t understand is this: if they are supposed to be so smart, WHY WOULD THEY COME TO A PLANET THAT IS 75% WATER WHEN WATER IS THEIR WEAKNESS?? You think that would be one of the first things they look for. How much water is on their planet?? What is their atmosphere like?? Does it rain?? It kills me that Shyamalan takes pains to make them seem intelligent and superior, yet they make a HUGE error in coming to a planet that is made up primarily of the substance that kills them.

Not a bad move, but there’s a lot of stuff in the movie that was just…wrong.

FYI….Netfilx can’t send me stuff fast enough, so I think I’m going to have to slow down to 1 or maybe 2 updates a week from here on out.