We were at Bumbershoot on Monday because one of Jenna's friends is the drummer in the Sneaky Thieves and we came to show our love. Since we were already there we decided to stay for two of the main stage concerts.

We saw John Legend in the afternoon and his set was quite good even though the acoustics weren’t that great since it’s an open air stadium. Once we figured out that we needed to go down in front of the stage instead of sitting up in the bleachers, it went from “aight” to “tight”.

The late show was Wu-Tang Clan and they represented. There were tracks from solo albums, from their classic first and second albums and even some of Ol’ Dirty’s singles rapped by Method Man. It was sick. The main surprise of the show was seeing how many kids who look like they weren’t born when Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) first dropped were in attendance. It was also kinda scary seeing so many kids blowing doja but I tried to remember that it was the same way when I was in my teens. Dang, I’m already getting too old for concerts.

In between John Legend and Wu-Tang, we went to see Rush Hour 3. It was pretty bad. Not only did the plot make no sense at all but they also reused plot elements from the previous movies in a non-ironic way. There were laughs but they came infrequently and the action was heavily toned down [probably because Jackie Chan is now in his fifties]. Overall, I give it *** out of ***** because it was still better than most of the crap Hollywood puts out these days.   

Now playing: Wu-Tang Clan - Protect Ya Neck

Before starting this review I should probably point out that I'm a Transformers fan. Every car I've ever owned has either had an autobot or decepticon insignia on the bumper and I have most of the seasons for the original TV show on DVD. That said, when I first saw the trailers for Transformers I expected the movie to suck because it seemed like there were too many people and not enough robots, boy was I wrong. The movie freaking rocked. The movie had it all; comedy (the kid's parents being typical annoying nosy parents), romance (nerd meets hot girl and impresses her with his cool car), action (soldiers shooting guns, giant robots shooting guns and Optimus Prime vs. Megatron), tragedy (***spoiler deleted***) , product placement (GMC trucks, eBay¹), quotes from the cartoon ("Autobots...roll out!" ,"Megatron must be stopped...no matter cost!", "You've failed me yet again, Starscream") and foreshadowing of the sequel. At two and a half hours I thought the movie would be too long but it didn't seem that way at all. I loved it, my fiancée loved it and so did the kids. Definitely the most fun movie I've seen this summer. 

I saw it on Tuesday evening and the theater was packed. This may have been because of the current heat wave forcing people out of their homes and into any air-conditioned building they could find or it could have been because the favorable reviews have gotten people curious about the movie. I suspect it was a little of both.

Rating: **** out of *****

Footnote
¹ Is it me or does it seem like there is a crazy amount of product placement from online services these days? In the past month I've seen eBay featured prominently in movies like 40-year Old Virgin and Transformers. Songs about meeting girls which heavily feature MySpace from mainstream acts like Gym Class Heroes and T-Pain. I've seen Google used repeatedly in movies like The Holiday and Knocked Up...even crazier was when Spider-Man unmasked himself as Peter Parker at a press conference in The Amazing Spider-Man issue #533 then in the very next panel there was Google product placement. The only Microsoft mentions I've seen in pop culture were some teens playing Gears of War in Live Free or Die Hard but the name of the game or the XBox are never mentioned. Our marketing guys have some 'splaining to do.

This movie might not suck after all.

Just in case this gets taken down, you can also find the trailer (in HD) at http://movies.yahoo.com/summer-movies/Transformers/1808716430/trailers/31

I saw Spider-Man 3 this weekend and it probably counts as the worst movie in what has been a pretty good series. The action scenes were good especially the climactic battle but the plot and story in-between the fight scenes was almost non-existent. There were a number of scenes that were so cheesy I felt embarrassed for the actors. The most accurate review of the movie I saw was Richard Roeper's review in the Chicago Sun Times where he wrote

If you walked out of the exhilarating triumph that was “Spider-Man 2” and immediately started counting the days until the release of Spidey Trois, there’s probably nothing I can say that will dissuade you from racing to the multiplex for the eagerly anticipated third installment — but I gotta try, anyway, so here goes.

Kirsten Dunst sings in this movie, more than once.

At one point Peter Parker undergoes a personality and style makeover that makes him look and act like he’s the unknown third brother from “A Night at the Roxbury.”
...
and a slimy creepy crawler has emerged from the space rock and is now residing in Peter’s apartment. The creepy crawler affixes itself to Peter’s face one night and enters his being, turning him into a darker, more aggressive personality who favors an all-black costume as Spidey — and a whole new ’tude as Peter.

This leads to one of the most bizarre montages in superhero movie history, with Peter changing his hair, buying a European suit and strutting down Manhattan like some clueless, low-rent gigolo, pointing and winking at women who look at him with disgust. On the outs with Mary Jane because he’s been insensitive to her career setbacks, Peter goes on a date with Gwen (Bryce Dallas Howard), one of Spider-Man’s many rescue cases. They show up at the jazz club where Mary Jane works as a singing waitress, and within seconds, Peter is banging away at the piano and dancing all over the joint like Jim Carrey in “The Mask.” It’s very goofy.

The Night at the Roxbury inspired scenes were so bad that a couple of folks walked out of the movie. Unfortunately, for them the final battle made up for the cheesiness we were forced to sit through earlier in the movie.

Instead of seeing Clerks II last week, I ended up seeing My Super Ex-Girlfriend which turned out to have been a bad choice. I wanted to go catch Clerks II this past weekend but my girlfriend decided that it was her turn to pick movies after My Super Ex-Girlfriend was such a disappointment. So we saw Miami Vice instead. Below are some brief thoughts on both movies

This was nothing like the TV show. It was more like a darker, grittier version of Bad Boys 2 complete with trips to exotic South American locales to cavort with drug dealers. There wasn't a lot of action but whenever the guns did blaze the scenes were pretty intense.

My only complaint was that Colin Farrell's acting seemed pretty wooden at times.

Rating: **** out of *****

It goes downhill pretty fast from there, it's as if the writers only had a few gags involving super-powered revenge pranks without any thought of how to conclude the movie. The last couple of scenes such as the super heroine cat fight and the over-the top obnoxiousness of Rainn Wilson's character left a foul taste in my mouth. It was a promising movie which failed to live up to its promise. 

Another problem I had with the movie was failing to believe that anyone would pick a ditzy Ana Faris over a super-powered Uma Thurman regardless of how 'psycho' of a girlfriend she was. That was a bad casting choice in my book.

Rating: *** out of *****

2006 looks like another good year for superhero movies. I just saw X-Men: The Last Stand and I'm looking forward to Superman Returns and My Super Ex-Girlfriend. I love the annual summer movie season and this year has been pretty decent so far for movies.  Below is a brief list of movies I've seen this year with a mini-review and a rating.

• Thank You For Smoking (***** out of *****): Excellent satire. Hilarious because you know it is true. The only dark spot was Katie Holmes who just seems unbelievable in any role outside of Dawson's Creek. She ruined Batman Begins for me as well.
  

• Mission: Impossible 3 (**** out of *****): An action packed adrenaline rush. Definitely the best movie in the series.
  

• Ice Age: The Meltdown (**** out of *****): As funny as the original. I like how the movie was about global warning but they managed to not include any lectures on the topic in the movie.
  

• RV (**** out of *****): Funny, if you liked Chevy Chase's vacation movies from years past. I did.
  

•  X-Men: The Last Stand (*** out of *****): Not as action packed as the second movie in the series. Having two main plotlines(Jean Grey's Phoenix Saga and a cure for mutants) instead of a single theme didn't help. They definitely tried to go out with a bang but in the final seconds of the movie you could tell that they left the door open for more sequels even if this is the "Last Stand". Lame.
  

• The Brothers Grimm (** out of *****): This movie was ridiculously bad, I'm stunned Matt Damon agreed to be in this crap. I didn't bother to finish it.
  

• Elizabethtown (** out of *****): Besides the fact that there seemed to be little on-screen chemistry between Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom, this movie was trying too hard to tug at our heart strings. Go watch The Family Stone instead.
  

• Date Movie (* out of *****): Rule #1 of parody moies, don't make a parody that is less funny than the original.
  

What movies have you seen this year that are worth seeing and what would you advise that I avoid given my ratings above?

I saw Batman Begins this weekend and I'm still trying to decide whether it is the best Batman movie of all time or not. Although there is no villain who gives a performance as commanding as Jack Nicholson's in 1989 Batman movie, Christian Bale is a better Batman than Michael Keaton and Michael Caine plays Alfred better than I imagined possible. Morgan Freeman is also great as Lucius Fox.

The movie is over 2 hours long which is to be expected given that it spends the first 45 minutes or more on the back story leading up to Bruce Wayne deciding to become the Batman. Though the movie is a bit long it makes up for this by hitting all the right notes when it comes to exploring the Batman mythos. My favorite themes from the comic are there from the night and day difference between Bruce Wayne's playboy lifestyle and Batman's ongoing war on crime to Jim Gordon questioning whether the existence of Batman encourages the existence of the more "theatrical" criminals (e.g. Joker, Two Face and the Riddle).

I definitely can't wait to see the next movie in the series.

Score: **** out of *****

I went to see the movie Robots based on the positive reviews of it on Yahoo! Movies both by critics and regular Yahoo! users. The only positive thing I can say about this movie is that the animation was quite good. Everything else about the movie sucked. The songs were annoying, the characters irritating, the jokes were unfunny and the story plodded along in an uninteresting fashion.

Sitting through the movie until the end was an ordeal for myself and the everyone I saw the movie with. Avoid this movie like the plague.

Rating: ** out of *****

I saw The Incredibles this weekend and it was great. The animation was amazing, the story top notch and it had the right ratio of action to humor. This is probably one of the best super hero movies I've ever seen.

Rating: ***** out of *****

I saw Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence last night. I'm not a big fan of some of the critically acclaimed plot driven members of the anime genre such as the original Ghost in the Shell and Akira. I always thought they didn't have enough action nor did they delve deeply enough into the philosophical questions they raised. Thus I have tended to prefer anime that doesn't have any pretension of intellectual depth and was just straight violence fest such as Crying Freeman, Ninja Scroll and most recently Berserk.

Ghost in the Shell 2 struck a happy balance for me. It had excellent action, especially the scene where Batuo visits a local Yakuza hang out with a heavy machine gun. I also thought the exploration of what it means to be truly human in a world where the line between man and machine is continually blurred was better done in Innocence than in the original Ghost in the Shell. It just seemed a lot less heavy handed.

I'm definitely going to pick up the Ghost in the Shell TV series from Fry's later this week

Rating: **** out of *****

Just as it looks like my buddy Erik Meijer is done with blogging (despite his short lived guest blogging stint at Lamda the Ultimate) it looks like a couple more of the folks who brought Xen to the world have started blogging. They are

1. William Adams: Dev Manager for the WebData XML team.

2. Matt Warren: Formerly a developer on the WebData XML team, now works on the C# team or on the CLR (I can never keep those straight).

Both of them were also influential in the design and implementation of the System.Xml namespace in version 1.0 of the .NET Framework.

I'm probably the last geek in the US to have seen Matrix Revolutions and like most I'm of mixed minds about the experience. On the one hand as an action flick the movie isn't bad but as a Matrix sequel there are just too many issues with it that will probably prevent the multiple repeat viewings that I have enjoyed with the previous two movies.

Looking at the comments on the recent Slashdot poll about Matrix Revolutions it seems most people had to come up "deeper meanings" for the movie to prevent watching it from seeming like a waste of money. I've tried but I can't, as a Matrix movie it was anti-climactic especially after the confusing roller coaster ride that was Matrix Reloaded. Like everyone my beef is with the large number of unanswered questions from the previous movies. The paucity of martial arts fighting in this movie was also a minus.

However, if this was the first movie in the series I'd seen I'd probably have considered it a good movie.

I saw Kill Bill Vol 1 last night with Josh, Gretchen, Mike (someone really needs to hook him up with an RSS feed), Chris and a couple of other folks. I knew we were going to be in for a ride when during the credits I noticed the names of martial arts legends Gordon Liu (Enter the 36th Chamber of Shaolin & Shaolin Challenges Ninja) and Sonny Chiba (Storm Riders & The Street Fighter) as well as the fact the movie would be featuring music produced by the RZA.

This movie is definitely a homage to old school martial arts flicks and is shot in a stylish, off kilter manner and embraces a mish mash of techniques (black & white, anime, etc)  in a way that reminded me of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.

In typical Quentin Tarantino style we start with a scene in the middle of the story and afterwards piece together how things got to that juncture. It started off kinda slow and I was actually disappointed in the fight between Vivica Fox and Uma Thurman but once we got to the parts of the movie that occured in Japan the fights there more than made up for it.

Just like the movies it is paying homage to the plot is braindead simple. A wedding party was shot up and left for dead but the bride survived. She awakens from a coma 4 years later with a lust for revenge and goes on an ass kicking crusade.

I've seen some complaints about the violence/gore and I agree that it was definitely over the top even by Tarantino standards. Decapitations and dismemberments were definitely the order of the day with blood spurting from wounds in a manner  reminiscent of movies like Invincible Super Chan and Ninja Scroll.

Overall, I liked it a lot and will definitely be in theaters next year to catch Kill Bill Vol. 2

Score: **** out of *****