Moneyball

We got Moneyball on Netflix and watched it last night. While I don't particularly care for baseball, I thought it was a really great movie, and totally recommend it. It took a unique point of view of sports that I found both entertaining and interesting. Basically, during the early 1990's the Oakland A's found themselves in a situation where they were competing with teams who had two or three times as much money (and thus were able to afford "better" players). In order to stay competitive, they had to find a way to win without exceeding their minimal budget, and without "premiere" players. Using math and statistics they were able to produce a 20 game winning streak (that had never been accomplished in baseball) despite the fact that it went against the standard ideas about how to set up a winning team .
It was one of  the best "story problem" (borrowing from high school math terminology) example I've ever seen worked out. And the first one I've ever seen used as the premise for a movie.
It was a wonderful example of the power and utility of math, and why having even a fundamental grasp on it is so helpful in understanding the world we find ourselves in. And both Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill were really good in it.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention it in case you were riding the fence on watching it!

The Lorax

I haven't been this disappointed in a movie since...The Clash of the Titans came out (and ironically, I just saw a preview for a sequel....Who knows, maybe this is where they actually introduce the Titans?).
I'm a huge animated movie fan. I got Despicable ME and Monsters Inc. for Christmas and was excited about it.  Horton Hears a Who is my go to movie when I am sick in bed, or feeling blue, and so I was pretty stoked to go see The Lorax over the weekend and...what a disappointment! We were about 20 minutes into the movie when I actually whispered to my BF "Wow. This is really boring. This is not funny at all." And it was true. The one minute preview of Despicable Me 2 was funnier than the whole feature we went to see.
The Lorax is a thinly veiled "save the trees/ socialist/weirdly religious/sexist" affair, with  horrible music, disturbing LSD-like montages, and no humor what so ever. I almost got up and left half way through, it was that bad.
The movie is about a young inventor with a bright idea and a twinkle in his eye who goes out and tries to make these things called thneads. He uses the leaves from trees (which don't look anything like trees) to make them, and as his company becomes more successful, the more trees he chops. He bribes the creepy woodland creatures (who remind me of something off a Greatful Dead bumper sticker) with marshmallows until he can't anymore, and then he just ignores them and buys himself a ridiculous Flava-Flav suit and dances around singing about how he's done "nothing wrong", with dollar signs dancing behind him.

Eventually of course the trees are gone, air quality starts going down, the Lorax ascends into heaven, and the would-be inventor locks himself away in guilty exile, but does nothing to fix the problem. Years pass, and then some other cliched-corporate A-hole starts selling manufactured "fresh air" (which reminds me of Spaceballs) to the wholly oblivious town of Thneadville.
In Thneadville there is a little boy who had the hots for the slightly older neighbor girl. She wishes she could see a real tree, so he goes out to find one for her. Why she can't go out and find her own tree is beyond me. But apparently she is either not creative enough to think if it on her own, or smart enough to...who knows.
So then the boy goes to see the inventor who tells him the whole story of how he's responsible for all the trees being gone and gives the boy a seed to plant a tree (why he didn't plant it himself is one of the many obvious questions that the writers didn't bother to ask) and then suddenly there are trees everywhere (never mind that there was only ONE seed left) and everyone is happy, and the little boy is a hero and gets a kiss from the girl, and the Lorax descends from the sky like Jesus on the day of glory, and the Inventor is redeemed. The end.
The credits started rolling and I was like...WTF?!
It is my opinion that this movie is a total waste of money. I wouldn't even recommend it on Netflix because you still won't be able to get that hour and a half of your life back. In fact, if someone were to walk up to me and offer me a free copy of this movie I would say "No thanks." and move on. You can, of course, go see it if you want to. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

9 Gets a 1 out of 10

It is astonishing what passes for kid's movies these days. I practically had nightmares last night after watching the movie 9. (It's one of those digitally animated cartoons.) It was so scary! They showed corpses of humans littered throughout a post-apocalyptic city destroyed by and army of machines. This includes a dead mother holding her dead baby in a pick up truck. An odd choice I thought.
The main characters are little burlap covered robot men crudely assembled with numbers on their back (which represent aspects of the soul of the scientist who created them and that he infused with their bodies), and a giant machine with a red eye that reminds me of The Lord of the Rings, that makes other machines to hunt and kill the little burlap guys.
One of these other machines had a doll heads with the lower jaw missing and one red eye and the body of snake! Can it get any scarier than that? It was like Chucky on a serpent body. Truly frightening I tell you! Is that something you would want a kid to see? Is that something YOU want to see?
On top of that most of the 9 burlap guys do die, by having their life sucked out of their mouth and eyeballs by a flashing light on the machine. (I get the shivers just thinking about it).
Anyway my point is, it was absolutely inappropriate for kids, and most adults too for that matter. It was scary, it wasn't funny at all, it was depressing, AND the story line was weak, and poorly thought out. I guess they were trying to make a point about technology, but I am not sure. Maybe they were trying to make a kids version of the Terminator? Anyway, terrible movie! Don't see it with kids!

Clash of the Storyline

I went to see Clash of the Titans yesterday, and had I been by myself I would have walked out. It was TERRIBLE!
I hardly even know where to begin! The writers (or whomever) took one of the great classic stories from Greek mythology and made almost unrecognizable (and much worse than the original)! It is truly a shame. What's even worse is that millions of Americans will think they know the story of Perseus, and have no clue that the garbage they watched was almost completely false. Here are just a few of errors:
1. There were in fact no Titans in the movie. How ridiculous is that? The Titans were the parents and aunts and uncles of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, and they were definitely not in there.
2. In the movie Zeus actually liked people...Ummm...since when? Zeus if you recall, only tolerated humans. He seduced women incessantly (afterward turning them into animals, or worse allowing them to be murdered by their husbands for their transgression), and even condemned the Titan Prometheus to having his liver eaten out every day forever because he (Prometheus) felt bad that man was upon the earth and freezing and stole fire from Zeus to warm them. Zeus was a bastard, and nowhere in Greek mythology was he a champion of man.
3. Since when does Perseus marry Io (who by the way as the original story goes was seduced by Zeus, turned into a cow and given to his wife Hera), and not Andromeda? The answer is never. Even in the constellations Perseus, and Andromeda are together. What is the deal with messing up that fundamental part of the story?
4. Zeus didn't give Perseus the sword, Hermes did. And Perseus never got his helmet of invisibility or his winged sandals that were a part of the original story.
5. I am pretty sure I would remember giant the scorpions in the original story had there been any. I do recall reading that the blood dripping from Medusa's severed head produced serpents in the desert, but I hardly see how that could be interpreted as giant man eating scorpions that occurred before they even encountered Medusa.
6. The creatures with the blue eyes...WTF? I don't even know where to begin with that one.I have no idea what they were supposed to be or why they were added. They reminded me of something I'd seen in Army of Darkness.
7. Why was pegasus black? And why wasn't he born from Medusa's severed head like he was supposed to be?
OK, I really don't have the time to rant any longer, but really if you have any interest in mythology do NOT go and see this movie. It was a colossal failure.