Quick Reviews: June 2012 (So Far)

With this I'll be caught up in my movie posts! Woot!

Snow White and the Huntsman: I liked this more than I thought I would, although it was a bit ponderous at times. Charlize Theron seems to be specializing in extremely icy characters right now. She pulled off the evil queen bit without overacting the way Julia Roberts did in "Mirror Mirror," the first of the Snow White movies. To be fair, though, the two films are very, very different. My grade: B-minus.

Prometheus: Charlize Theron icy performance number two. But this thing...oh, dear. A mess of a plot about a space exploration to find and make contact with the apparent creators of humanity on Earth, ridiculous characterization, and what strikes me as a deliberate shoehorning of enough details to allow people to think of this as the prequel to "Alien" just to make money. My grade: D-plus.

Rock of Ages: I can see how this became a Broadway hit, a love story combined with 80s hair-band rock.  But this movie is absolutely terrible. I never was a big fan of that music, and although some of the original songs admittedly are great, as performed here by the likes of Tom Cruise (as seriously messed-up rock god Stacee Jaxx) even the good songs lose a lot. Let's put aside how the ostensible stars, and subjects of the love story, Julianne Hough and Diego Boneta, might as well be invisible for all their impact. I ask you this: how can Hough's character, a wannabe singer first seen on a bus from Oklahoma to Hollywood, be named Sherrie Christian, leading to her (and her fellow bus passengers) singing Night Ranger's "Sister Christian," and NOT have her boyfriend sing Steve Perry's "Oh Sherrie" to her? I waited for it in vain the whole damn film. I nearly walked out a couple of times. In retrospect, after seeing the duet of "Can't Fight This Feeling" towards the end by Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand (I'm saying nothing more), I wish I had. My grade: F.

Quick Review: Despicable Me

I guess I can state this as a fact: usually, the first trailer for a movie will be a small tease, often showing very little of the film itself. Something like this one, for example. Then, as the film's release date nears, its trailers get more detailed -- and in some cases, too detailed, giving away key plot points unnecessarily. In the case of the computer-animated (and 3-D, although I've pretty much decided that 3-D isn't worth the extra money) "Despicable Me," the first teaser only showed a bit of the film's opening scene, capped off by a silhouette of the supervillain Gru (voice of Steve Carell). Later trailers introduced the little yellow minions that we're all now familiar with, and then the three little orphan girls, and by that point I wasn't quite sure how all of this was supposed to fit together. Fortunately, it fits together very well. Gru, with the help of his minions and his assistant, Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand), plots to steal the moon (by shrinking it) in order to regain his status as the number one supervillain from Vector (Jason Segel), but Vector has stolen the shrink ray Gru needs. Enter the three orphan girls, selling cookies door-to-door; Gru adopts them just to get into Vector's lair but then finds himself becoming attached to them. So there's the requisite warm-and-fuzzies, and a good number of laughs to boot. (I loved the sight gag showing what the Bank of Evil, where Gru visits to try and obtain funding for his moon-stealing plot, used to be.) It's not quite "Toy Story 3," but it's close. My grade: A-minus.

Quick Review: Get Him To The Greek

One of my favorite movies of 2008 was "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," in which the title character breaks up with Jason Segel's character and moves on to a rock star named Aldous Snow, lead singer of Infant Sorrow. The movie did well enough to lead to another one -- except it's not a sequel but a spinoff featuring Snow (Russell Brand). In "Get Him to the Greek," Snow is in a downward spiral after the commercial failure and critical revulsion at his new song, "African Child." He goes off the wagon, drinking and drugging, and his pop-star girlfriend leaves him, taking their son with her. Enter Aaron Green (Jonah Hill, who was also in "Sarah Marshall" but as a different character), who works for Snow's record company. It's Aaron's assignment to escort Snow from London to New York (to appear on the "Today" show) and then to L.A. for a concert at the Greek Theater to mark the 10th anniversary of Snow's legendary concert there. There was an underlying sweetness to "Sarah Marshall" that made that film really shine. That is non-existent in "Get Him to the Greek." The film tries at times, with scenes involving Aaron and his girlfriend ("Mad Men" star Elisabeth Moss) and Aldous and his ex, but it's overwhelmed by the raunchiness. Some of it works, some of it doesn't, but there are some real laugh-out-loud moments, and a wild performance by Sean "Puff Daddy/Puffy/Puff/P. Diddy/Diddy" Combs as the head of the record company. My grade: B.