If you’re my age, you may remember playing Basic Edition Dungeons and Dragons.  Yeah, it wasn’t too intricate, and the characters and monsters you encountered were pretty simple, but a thirteen year old could figure it out and be a Dungeon Master in a couple of hours, and everyone had a lot of fun.  If you remember the hours of fun, gallons of soda, and mountains of snacks consumed as you wound your way through forests, dungeons, and villages, please raise your hand.

Now, imagine that somebody made a movie out of the teenage ideas of magic and monsters that were in that Basic set, and you have the makings for a movie like Seventh Son.  It’s a lot of fun, had some outstanding visual effects, and went just deep enough to enjoy.

The movie centers around Thomas, played by Ben Barns, the proverbial seventh son of a seventh son, who is bought by “Spook” Gregory, played by Jeff Bridges.  A Spook is a knight who would fit very well into a Larry Correia novel – a monster hunter and destroyer of witches.  Gregory is the last of his kind, but continues to ‘recruit’ apprentices to take over for him.  His last apprentice, played by Kit Harrington (who probably didn’t even have to change his costume from his character on a little-known TV show), is killed in a battle with Mother Malkin, played by Julianne Moore.  Gregory and Malkin have a history, including Gregory locking Malkin in a cave for a few decades, and she’s back for revenge.  Tom meets and falls in love with Alice, played by Julia Vikander, when she is about to be burned as a witch. The rest is pure monsters, magic, and mayhem.

The acting in the movie is a bit uneven, but not so bad that the movie itself is not enjoyable.  Bridges never seems to find the correct voice for Gregory, and his portrayal changes several times during the movie.  Also, the love scenes between Tom and Alice seem to have been written by a tweenage girl who has never actually been kissed, but can imagine how it would work.  Julianne Moore turns in the best performance of the picture as Malkin, which isn’t surprising.

However, the action scenes were pretty well done, and the visual effects were excellent.  Whereas Peter Jackson’s use of CGI in “The Battle of the Five Armies” was clumsy and stood out, the CGI monsters in “Seventh Son” blended in very well with the setting.

Overall, I’d give this movie a low B.  It was worth the cost of the tickets and popcorn, but won’t be something I’ll seek out later.

Peter Jackson completes his Hobbit trilogy with this year’s installment, The Battle of the Five Armies.  The best thing I can say about this movie is that it closes the wound.

TL;DR version – Save your money and rent this ponderous, bloated movie and watch it from the comfort of your home, if at all.  Seriously, you could get the same experience from reading The Hobbit, the Silmarillion, and a Harlequin romance.

Analysis (Spoilers Ahead)

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If you watched the TV series Firefly, you’ll recall the basic facts of how humans found themselves in the ‘Verse:  Earth got “used up”, and humans had to find a new home.  Interstellar could be the story of how that happened.

Plot Synopsis, with minimal spoilers:

Interstellar is set in the not too near, but not too far, future, where the nations of the world have had to give up their strife in order to concentrate on basic survival.  A “blight” has destroyed the world’s wheat crops entirely, and is slowly working its way through the rest of the staple crops, such as okra and corn.  Human population is crashing, with one character remarking about how it’s hard to imagine 6 billion people.  Add to that dust storms that are reminiscent of the 1930’s American Dust Bowl, and you can see why the world isn’t that great a place.  A secret program to find a better place is underway, and former pilot/astronaut Cooper is drawn into it in a desperate attempt to save his family.

Analysis:

The plot isn’t a techno-thriller, but it has an amazing amount of tension throughout most of the movie.  There are exciting semi-action scenes scattered through the movie, but they are neither over the top nor out-of-place.  They all happen for a reason, and they all support the furthering of the story.  While there is no overall antagonist, other than the “We have to save the world”, the conflicts, both big and small, between the characters fill that gap.  The movie clocks in at almost 3 hours, and by the end of it, you’ve noticed.  But don’t take that to mean that you’ll be bored and wanting to get it over with.  While the last 30 minutes or so definitely tie up all the loose ends and finish the story, it doesn’t feel too contrived.  This is a thinking movie, not a lens-flare and big explosions movie.

What I liked:

The casting is, for the most part, outstanding.  Matthew McConaughey plays the main character, Cooper.  Michael Caine plays Professor Brand, the leader of the effort to save humanity.  Anne Hathaway plays Brand’s daughter, who is a scientist and accompanies Cooper on his voyage.  John Lithgow plays Cooper’s father-in-law, who stays behind to look after his children, and puts in one of the better character roles I’ve seen in a while.  All of these actors seemed to fit into their roles extremely well, and they all turned in good performances, with Caine and McConaughey being the best in a crowd of experts.

The cinematography and visual effects in this movie were outstanding.  The space scenes look almost like something that NASA might beam back from the ISS, while the settings on alien worlds look photo-realistic.  If CGI was used as a backdrop to live actors, I couldn’t tell.

Something else that I liked was that the technology, especially the interiors of the space ships and habitats, looked real and lived-in.  Things are dirty and scuffed from use.  Things go wrong, and the characters have to live within the limits of their mission and the resources aboard their ship.  There is very little suspension of belief about how they travel, and where we have to take their word for something, it’s explained using plausible terms, rather than a semi-mystical talk of hyper-conductive crystals.

What I didn’t like:

There were only two things that I didn’t care for in this movie. One was Matt Damon, and the other one wasn’t.  Damon plays Dr. Mann, who is an astronaut who was sent on an earlier mission to scout for a habitable world and hasn’t seen another human being in years.  His performance was forced and heavy-handed, and I had a hard time believing that a man who had put himself into suspended animation after his supplies ran out would be pudgy.  This was the one place where I think the casting was wrong in this movie, and it distracted me from an important part of the story.

The other thing is really a quibble, and one I don’t think most people will notice or care about.  There is a scene late in the movie where one of the minor characters arms himself to protect against someone who he thinks will harm him or Cooper’s now-adult daughter.  They had travelled a long way from their secure area, through a world that is quickly coming apart, and the best weapon he has is a tire iron.  Maybe it’s just me, but if I was going to be traveling alone with a pretty woman across a landscape that is populated mostly with dying farms and refugees, I’d have brought something a little more ballistic for both of us.  For a movie that put a lot of thought and effort into making the space-based storyline realistic and plausible, this stuck out for me.

Overall, I’d give this movie an A.  As you can see, what I disliked in it was, to be honest, minor, and there is a lot to like.  If you like relatively hard science fiction without too much Buck Rogers, you will definitely enjoy this one.

Discussion:  (Warning, spoilers ahead)

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Since it’s hot, muggy, and Father’s Day, I decided today was a good day to go watch a family movie, and this one hit it out of the park.

How To Train Your Dragon 2, the sequel to the 2010 hit, picks up about five years after the original.  Dragons have been fully integrated into the Viking society of Burk, and all of the teenage heroes of the first film are now on the cusp of adulthood, complete with romance and fitting themselves into adult roles.  While exploring, Toothless and Hiccup learn of an evil warrior who enslaves dragons, and the story follow on from there. (Sorry for the crappy synopsis.  I’m trying to not give too many spoilers, because I want y’all to enjoy this movie as much as I did)

The story is very well paced and written.  There were very few places where it slowed down, and those were done for excellent reasons.  Having all of the original voice actors back to make the sequel helped to create a continuity that is missing from a lot of second efforts.  Since I have a six year old son, I’ve seen a lot of the TV cartoons based on the first movie, which fill in holes from the intervening five years in the story, but this didn’t make things boring to me and Boo, and you can enjoy and understand the movie even if you haven’t seen the TV show.  Boo sat quietly for the entire movie, and I never felt bored at all.

The animation was outstanding, leaving the first movie far behind.  Because all of the characters have aged, the makers were able to update their animation a bit, making them some of the most detailed animated humans I’ve ever seen.  The backgrounds and creature animation are almost lifelike in a lot of ways.

The theme of the first movie revolves around the first steps a child takes into adolescence, and this movie continues that with adolescents taking their first steps into adulthood.  It’s done at a level that people of all ages can understand, so it’s kind of thick in places, but it’s done very well for the most part.

The music in the movie was similar to that of the first, but had a little more ‘poppy’ feel to it in places.  I found that a bit distracting, but not so much that I fell out of the movie.

I definitely recommend this movie, either as a matinee with the kids or as a date night with your sweetheart.  We will definitely be purchasing it when it comes out on DVD.

On Friday night, I joined a group of my friends and co-workers to watch a screening of “Lone Survivor“.  The film is a dramatization of the book of the same name by Marcus Lattrell and Patrick Robinson.  It is one of the better war movies I’ve ever seen, and the way that it deals with real heroes and how they faced duty, life, and death makes it one of the best movies I’ve seen in the past few years.

Plot Summary  (Spoiler Alert)

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Short version – A well made movie that I didn’t enjoy much.

American Hustle is a fictionalized telling of Abscam, the FBI operation to entrap politicians into corruption charges in the late 1970’s.  It tells the story of Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), a small-time con-man, Sidney Prosser (Amy Adams), his mistress and business partner, and Richie Dimaso (Bradley Cooper), an FBI agent who forces the other two into his schemes. Jeremy Renner plays Carmine Polito, a New Jersey politician who is the first victim of DiMaso’s megalomania, and Jennifer Lawrence plays Rosalyn Rosenfeld, Irving’s wife.

The casting for this movie was excellent.  There was no real effort in believing that each of the characters were portrayed exactly the way they should have been.  Cooper’s DiMaso is the perfect over-reaching government goon, high on power.  Lawrence’s portrayal of a manipulative wife is spot-on.  All of the actors in the movie are established and talented, and I don’t think anyone gave less than full effort.

The soundtrack for the movie, done by Danny Elfman, is mostly popular music from the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Some of it gave me that “Hey, I like that tune” feeling, while others made me cringe.  However, all of the music fit perfectly with the scene and direction in which they were used.

Costumes were actually a high point of the movie.  Every inch of cloth was used to show just how cheap and tacky the characters wearing them were, and where the clothes were tasteful, so were the characters.

As for the plot and pacing, it could have used a bit of work.  The movie comes in at 138 minutes, and there were a lot of scenes that I think could have been trimmed.  The movie starts slow, and while there is quite a bit of tension after the mid-point, it’s a thinker, not a doer.  After an hour, I was looking at my watch and wondering how much longer the movie would last.

Like I said before, I didn’t really enjoy this movie, but it was a good movie.  The only character that I connected with was Carmine, the New Jersey politician, and that was only because he was basically a good guy who let himself get mixed up in something smarmy and I pitied him.  The rest of the characters were pathetic.  Honestly, I was hoping for some sort of catastrophic die-off in the end.

If you’ve seen Goodfellas or Summer of Sam, you’ve seen the look and feel of this movie, and if you liked them, you should at least find this movie interesting.  Just like those two movies, however, this is an adult movie for adults.  I wouldn’t suggest this movie for even teenagers, unless you want to explain some of the more sordid details.  There is a lot of language in this movie, and a few sex scenes, but other than extremely low-cut blouses made with thin, sheer material, I don’t remember any nudity.

I’ll give this one a B-.  It’s a good movie, it just wasn’t for me.