The Weekend Movie Reviews

[Stephen of Borg 2]

Hey guys, have you ever felt like going to a movie this weekend, but jus didn’t know which movie to go see? Well, this is the new movie thread where every week I’ll update the new releases of movies that are coming out in theaters over the weekend. This will also have the reviews of the films by Roger Ebert and Roeper and various other critics (usually Dave White or Leonard Maltin). This way, you will know what movies are coming out this weekend and you will also have an opinion on whether or not the film is worth seeing or if it is better to just save your money. I will always try to have at least two critic reviews of each film, but there will sometimes be only one review per movie if the critic hasn’t currently released a review for the film. Occasionally, there will also be reviews of the DVDs being released every week. I hope you guys enjoy this and it helps

 

The new films being released this weekend, May 19th, are

 

 

 

The Da Vinci Code

 

 

PLOT: An academic (Hanks) and a cryptographer (Tautou) unravel a murder that occurred in the Louvre. Clues hidden in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci lead them to a religious mystery protected by a secret society for two thousand years.

 

Roger Ebert: Let us begin, then, by agreeing that The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction. And that since everyone has read the novel, I need only give away one secret -- that the movie follows the book religiously. The movie works; it's involving, intriguing and constantly seems on the edge of startling revelations. After it's over and we're back on the street, we wonder why this crucial secret needed to be protected by the equivalent of a brain-twister puzzle crossed with a scavenger hunt.

 

 

Leonard Maltin : I saw the movie with a clean slate, just the way I intended to, and it didn’t catch fire for me. It’s not uninteresting, but it tends to plod after a while. Its multiple false endings became tiresome. Given its notoriety—and its pedigree—I had every reason to hope for a crackling thriller full of intrigue and original ideas. I’m not even crazy about the way it was shot; did Ron Howard take a page from J.J. Abrams in deciding to film his stars in ultra-closeups so often?

 

 

 

Over the Hedge

 

 

 

 

PLOT: A mischievous racoon and his sensitive best-buddy turtle along with other forest creatures try to resist the evils and temptations of encroaching suburbia.

 

 

Roger Ebert: The encroachment of the forest animals and the efforts of the Verminator in "Over the Hedge" don't approach the wit and genius of a similar situation in the Academy Award-winning "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" (2005), but then how could they? This movie is pitched at a different level. But the action scenes are fun, the characters are well-drawn and voiced, and I thought the film's visual look was sort of lovely. If the animals lack the lofty thinking of their originals on the comics page, they are nevertheless a notch or two above the I.Q. levels of many an animated creature.

 

 

Dave White: It's Madagascar in the suburbs. And if you've seen Madagascar or The Wild or Ice Age or Shark Tale or Chicken Little or [insert any other cute animated animal movie here], then you will note that Over the Hedge is a little better than any of the ones on that list. But better doesn't mean great. It's funny enough and pointed enough (it wants to be satirical; more on that in a second), but not enough of either to make you forget Thumper. Or Flower. Or even Stitch.

 

 

 

 

See No Evil

 

 

 

PLOT: Sentenced to community service, a group of teens are dispatched to fix up a ramshackle hotel. Little do they know the hotel is home to a manical killer who looks to murder them one by one.

 

Dave White: Pretty bad. But that's just by normal movie-critic standards. It's also bad because it fails to be even a little inventive, and it's not scary at all. That's because it's kind of hard to be scared of Kane. He's a giant and all (6 feet, 9 inches, 300-plus pounds) but almost cuddly. And the movie gives you so many flashbacks to explain his character that you just feel sorry for him by the end. Kind of like King Kong.

 

 

 

Twelve and Holding

 

 

PLOT: When a young boy is murdered by local bullies, three kids contend with issues of grief, love, self-esteem, and a brother's desire for revenge

 

Roger Ebert: "Twelve and Holding" enters the intricate – and often humorous world where adolescence and adulthood collide, when parents at times seem as lost as their own children. As each family’s personal challenges are revealed, they learn to better understand each other and their own realities.

 

 

Dave White: This is one of those indie movies in which it seems as though the filmmaker doesn't have a handle on how to cut something open and inspect it (in this case, suburban adolescence) without mocking it in the process. And worse, it chokes in the process. It's never grotesque or cruel enough to be a Todd Solondz film, and it's too mushy, convenient and seemingly scared of its own content to be significant.

 

[DrWho42 13]

Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin are two pretty plusgood critics, in my personal opinion (most of the time..).

 

Not recognising this Mr White though, but I think Ebert has a pretty good mind for science-fiction and how it should be seeing as he used to work for some pulp sci-fi magazine called Xero and Maltin's pretty oriented and well-viewed with his B-movies, seeing as he did appear in the MST3k episode of "Gorgo", the British rip-off of Godzilla..

[Stephen of Borg 2]

X-men: The Last Stand

 

 

PLOT: A “cure” for mutancy threatens to alter the course of history. For the first time, mutants have a choice: retain their uniqueness, though it isolates and alienates them, or give up their powers and become human.

 

 

Roger Ebert: I enjoyed "X-Men: The Last Stand." I liked the action, I liked the absurdity, I liked the incongruous use and misuse of mutant powers, and I especially liked the way it introduces all of those political issues and lets them fight it out with the special effects. Magneto would say this is a test of survival of the fittest. Xavier would hope they could learn to live together.

 

 

David White: I had low expectations. It is a Brett Ratner movie, after all. But he's not bad with action sequences, and the ones here make you forget that he made Red Dragon and After the Sunset. It's the first halfway decent summer movie so far. It's only the fourth one, parading after M: I-3, Poseidon and Da Vinci, but it's more enjoyable than all of them put together. I know, faint praise and all that.

 

 

An Inconvenient Truth

 

 

PLOT: Al Gore has traveled the world delivering a presentation on the global climate change, proving that humankind must confront global warming now or face devastating consequence

 

 

David White: OK, here's my beef with Al Gore, and then I'll talk about the film's message: He's a hypocrite. During the Clinton administration, the causes of global warming were chugging right along with help from the government. Global warming didn't stop when the first Bush left the White House and start up again when the second Bush stole the place back for the Republicans. Gore himself gave the Tellico Dam project a waiver from the Endangered Species Act. George W. Bush might be a nightmare for the EPA, but the Democrats weren't their wet dream by a long shot.