Movie Reviews: Public Enemies, Ice Age 3, The Proposal

July 10th, 2009 by cbwilkins | Posted in Text blog, Video blog |

Public Enemies

Overall, I liked Public Enemies; it got a little long, especially toward the climax when instead of having the characters do anything they chose to intersplice artistic shots with clips from an old movie, but it had enough action and cool vintage stuff to keep me interested. It’s a shame Johnny Depp is such a nutjob, cause he really is a good actor. Marion Cotillard is incredibly pretty, and you get the sense that she’s a good actress, but she doesn’t really get to do much here. Here’s a clip that kind of exemplifies some of the issues I have with the movie:

Now yeah, it’s incredibly cool, and it’s all the kind of things you wish you could say to a woman (complete with her appropriate reaction), but really, it’s Johnny Depp getting to act while she says the occasional line and just kind of goes along for the ride. The love affair between these two characters, like the love affairs in most movies, really doesn’t seem to be based on anything, which makes it hard for me to, first, buy, and second, care about.

I was neat to see Stephen Graham, who you might remember at Tommy in Snatch, playing Baby Face Nelson. It’s always fun to have a character who’s completely insane, and he pulled it off well.

What this movie comes down to for me is that I always have problems with stories where they try to make a bad guy seem heroic or tragic. John Dillinger was not a good man, he robbed and killed people, but this movie attempts to make me, I don’t even know, feel for him? It’s just not gonna happen. If you take the intellectualizing out of things and just watch it, it’s a pretty decent gangster flick. Plus, it helps remind me of this, which is always fun:

Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs

I didn’t really care for the first Ice Age movie, I didn’t even bother to see the second one, and I really only saw this one to hang out with Eric, since I know he loves animated flicks. I think I laughed about four times the whole time I was watching this. The few jokes they had were tired and stale. Ray Romano and Queen Latifa don’t really have any charisma as voices alone. I can’t embed it, but here’s a clip that shows the problem; a whole minute and nothing funny happens. I’ve always loved cartoons (I’d actually love to see some full length old school animation movies come out again), but they just make too many of them.

But, I guess I might be alone. The lady sitting behind us was laughing her head off at every single “joke”. It actually makes a bad movie more enjoyable when someone else is inexplicably loving it.

The Proposal

Travis and I didn’t set out to see this last night, but I’m glad we did. Having your main male and female characters hate each other (before loving each other, of course) is a time-tested trick that pretty much always works. When you’ve got two people as skilled at being professionally charming as Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, you know it’s going to be even better.

Seriously, how jealous are you (if you’re a guy) of Ryan Reynolds? The dude is ridiculously good looking, incredibly well sculpted, freaking hilarious, and, oh yeah, his wife is Scarlett Johansson. Jeez, I don’t have a man crush or anything, I would just trade every aspect of my life for a couple of his.

But hey, Virginia native Sandra Bullock isn’t so bad either. I ahad a huge crush on her back in the day when Speed and Demolition Man came out around the same time, and I got to see a lot more of her than I thought I would in The Proposal. They hacked this clip to hell, but trust me, she’s fairly naked in the movie:

Speaking of naked, this is the first time I’ve seen Malin Ackerman in a movie where she didn’t get naked. It’s a shame, cause her character was fairly useless. But hey, there’s always this:

So yeah, they could have cut twenty minutes of unnecessary nonsense from the middle, and I don’t in any way believe that two people can go from hate to love over a weekend in Alaska, but the movie is smart, and funny, and definitely worth your time. Especially if you take a woman to go see it. That’s like half your foreplay in the bag already.