2012.

For such a long movie, you'd think I'd have a lot to say. I really don't. It's pretty much what you'd expect from a Roland Emmerich film. It has a huge cast of seemingly unrelated yet interconnected characters played by the likes of John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Oliver Platt, and Woody Harrelson. It's the end of the world, so there's a lot of survivalist action mixed with family drama. Some will do anything to live. Some will stay behind to do the nobel thing yet die in the process. Others will be jerks and upset everybody. Someone will put themselves and/or others in jeopardy to save a dog. And somebody will inevitably try to act the hero and nearly die in the process.

It's not a bad movie. Is it predictable? Sure. Is it entertaining? Most of it (it starts to stretch itself a bit thin in its second hour). How is it acted? Averagely. Are the special effects good? Very. Do I care about the characters? At least two (Cusack and Ejiofor. Maybe Cusack's daughter).

The best part of the film is its action scenes, the scenes wherein our main characters are trying to escape certain death. The main two scenes (or at least the best two scenes) are within the first hour or so. The first is when the world is first starting to go, and Cusack has to get his family across town to the airport in a limo while everything is falling apart around them, which is immediately followed up by the small airplane sequence as seen in the trailers, with the plane flying low through the collapsing city (the 'flying low' thing makes more sense in the context of the film, I think, once you know the circumstances). The second is at Yellowstone, when Cusack goes to meet back up with Harrelson to figure out where the "ships" are to get to safety, and in the process gets stuck in the middle of a Super Volcano eruption. After these two scenes, you do see a lot of worldly destruction, but it doesn't involve any main characters, so you really don't care. The next major suspense scene is at the climax of the film, which I won't ruin.

This is why I believe the second hour drags a bit. The two biggest suspense scenes occur toward the end of the first hour/beginning of the second hour. Then you have about an hour stretch with no major suspense before the climax of the film. We probably could have lost the subplot with the two fathers on the cruise ship. If we wanted to keep the time length, we could have given more substance to the Chinese family, which would have made them more than just a Deus Ex Machina for our main cast. Instead, they get about 2 main scenes of less than 5 minutes or so total before they come back into the picture in the third act.

In other words, it looked good and it did have some decent entertainment. There were some parts that probably weren't meant to be funny that were. And I couldn't help but think of Fezzik (The Princess Bride) any time that Russian Businessman spoke. I expected him to start rhyming any second. But it was a bit too long and could have easily been trimmed down a bit, mostly in the second hour. But it was pretty much exactly what I expected, so I wasn't really let down, either.

Stop Saying Okay! Okay.

FROST/NIXON.

Irrelevant, but you know it’s sad when you go to buy your ticket, and the guy behind the counter goes “Hey, you got a haircut!” Anyway, on to the movie. As you all know, this movie tells the story of television celebrity David Frost (Michael Sheen), who gets a sudden urge to interview Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) soon after the Watergate Scandal. Also involved are Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, and Toby Jones.

As you could probably gather from my pretty short synopsis, I don’t have much to say about the film. It’s kind of aggravating, really. Yes, the acting was great (with the exception of poor Toby Jones, who nearly made me want to laugh at his really forced tough-guy New York accent. Though I guess it’s more laughable when you realize this is the same guy who voiced Dobby the House Elf in Harry Potter). I also loved the symbolism with the shoes throughout the film.

But I really don’t have any overarching negative things to say about the film. I was never bored during its 2-hour time frame. It kept my attention, and I really enjoyed the film. If it were anything, it would be the depiction of Nixon. For a guy frequently described as quiet and to himself and who is horrible at small talk, the only time he ever felt awkward doing any small talk was during the scene it’s actually mentioned in the film. Before that, after that, he seemed perfectly capable of and not awkward at all about chit chatting with anybody.

And in the end, the movie was just, overall, too safe. Ron Howard made a rather predictable film. And I don’t mean that in the sense we all know what happens in the end (the boat sinks! Wait…). But I mean it in that even before I went in, I knew he was going to open it up with audio and/or video of real footage from Nixon and use that every now and then through the film. And the film didn’t make the characters/people anything more than they are set up to be: a naive man who gets some balls and overcomes his opponent (Frost) or a troubled man who comes to terms with what he did (Nixon). Everything was rather straight forward in its presentation, and there wasn’t really anything that made me go “Oh, wow, look at how he did that/portrayed that.” So while I really enjoyed the film as a whole (though they could have shown more of the actual interview stuff, in my opinion), it was no major stride forward in political biopics. But it wasn’t a step back, either. I’d recommend it.

A Keanu 'Whoa'

(P.S. This was a very difficult score to give. I think I really only gave it this score because of the superb acting. Otherwise, it would have gotten a very strong McLovin. So this is a weak 'Whoa', but a 'Whoa', nonetheless.)