Friday, May 8, 2009

Star Trek

Do not get me wrong, I love Star Wars, and its whole prequel series. It is great that they came up with that idea for some movies and went through with it. I only mention it because I think that those prequels probably greased the wheels for the Star Trek prequel.

I really pretty much disliked the first Star Trek movie. But the Wrath of Khan was a very decent movie. I cannot say that I have seen all the later Star Trek movies from the Next Generation group, but I have seen all the old ones.

This new Star Trek movie was great. It used all the things I like about science fiction movies, time travel and great special effects. There was a real specific enemy with a real specific story. I think that is what I did not like about the first movie. The enemy was a nebulous cloud, which lead to a nebulous plot, etc. If you like Star Trek, you will love this movie.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

X-Men: Wolverine

I saw this in the theatre on May 1, 2009. I enjoyed this movie. There was not much of Wolverine's childhood though, just his fathers' deaths and then they move into this kind of montage of Wolverine's war experiences. No real explanation of his mutation or why he ended up the way he did, but I guess that is just a premise of the whole series.

I liked Wolverine's brother. I did not get his "superhero" name though. And experiment 11 was pretty cool, I wish they would've had more of him, but he seems to lose his life in this movie, hopefully they will bring him back somehow.

I thought it was a neat use of Three Mile Island.

Lots of action and special effects. I hope they keep making movies from this series.

Marley & Me

I watched this Blu Ray last night. You know, I came away from this movie thinking that it was just kind of an Owen Wilson/Jennifer Aniston movie, instead of a movie about a dog. I did not read the book, which I assume is good or they would not have made a movie about it. I like Owen Wilson, Aniston, not so much, she's ok, but she just has way too much annoying back story with that whole Brad Pitt relationship. Owen, you can get lost in him even with his "suicide" attempt because he must be a good actor, but Aniston, I just sit there and think she is not a 40-something mother of three. Oh well.

The dog did a good job. They obviously used several dogs, a puppy, an older dog. I really liked the older dog, he did a good job of acting old. I actually met a dog actor when we went to Universal Studios a few weeks ago. He was pretty neat. The trainer said that he was in Beverly Hills Chihuahua. I put my arm around him and scratched his back a little when I had my picture taken with him. He seemed to appreciate it.

I did like the fact that they had a gag reel on this disc. I always hate it when there is no gag real, because everyone knows they make flubs while they are making these things, especially comedies. This is definitely one of my pet peeves, I can't even shut up about it when they include one.