Why do you think some studio executives were sitting around and said to each other, “Do you remember Conan the Barbarian?”  ”The one from 1982 with Arnold Swarzenegger and James Earl Jones?” said the other.  ”Yeah.  We should remake that,” exclaimed the other.  I have no answer to that because the it wasn’t good 29 years ago and it’s not good now.

The 2011 version doesn’t star anyone of impressive stature like the original.  This time the titular character is played by Jason Momoa (Stargate: Atlantis, HBO’s Game of Thrones) and he’s joined by the go-to baddie Stephen Lang (Avatar, Gettysburg), the gorgeous Rose McGowan (Scream, Grindhouse) and fanboy favorite Ron Pearlman (Hellboy, Season of the Witch) in a small opening act role.  The new version is also more expensive, slicker, more violent and, of course, in 3D.  None of that helps make the film better than its campy predecessor.

Both films are based on the comic book that not many are fans of and follows a similar plot.  Conan is a barbarian…naturally…who gets involved with a woman in his quest to revenge his father’s death.  Although the film is written by four different people, it’s the major reason why it didn’t perform to quality.  Even director Marcus Nispel attempted to polish this turd up as best he could.  He’s the guy that Hollywood seems to call on whenever they’re in need of a bloody revamp of an old classic.  He’s already had a noble attempt with a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a embarrassingly awful showing in his remake of Friday the 13th.  Although Nispel appeared to have been given gobs of money, elaborate sets, spectacular costumes and car-blanche on the violence, the script didn’t allow for much of any kind of enjoyment.

That’s not to say that some of the action sequences aren’t fine enough to chomp through on some popcorn.  In fact, in a summer that’s been filled with subpar action films, this one ranks up there among the top half.  But a watered down script and a brainless, mumbling performance from its star is enough for you to be bored and impatient until someone gets massacred again.

It’s really too bad that Momoa is such a bad actor because everyone else gives a decent, campy performance that’s right on par with what we’ve grown to expect from them.  McGowan adds another devious diva to her resume in what is a vastly underrated caliber of performer.  Not only is she beautiful, even when she has half her hairline shaved down, but seems to have so much fun in being bad.  Her interaction with Lang’s father-killing villain is fun but only in their nonverbal chemistry.  Whenever they open their mouths to spew the terrible dialogue that was provided for them it’s a letdown.

Aside from some fun 3D effects (including the first 3D sex scene) and exciting, big-budget action, Conan the Barbarian is a disappointment even when you expect it to be disappointing.  Besides shelling out the $10 per ticket for the movie, it makes you feel even more foolish for leaving the theater missing the awful, incoherent acting of Swarzenegger…and that’s a barbaric thought.
Conan the Barbarian  (Rated R)
Gavin Grade: C-

This movie doesn’t come out in theaters (if it comes out around Sacramento at all) until mid-June but you can get it on Comcast now.  That’s what I did, but I’m sure it watches a hundred times better on the big screen.

Troll Hunter is a modestly budgeted film from Norway that is done as a fake documentary.  It’s about a group of college students that need to find a great story for them to shoot their student project on.  At first they think they’re doing some investigative journalism into a local bear poacher but it quickly turns into a search for mythic beasts – trolls.  I know, I know…that sounds ridiculously stupid and some of you will continue to think that it is even if you watch it, but it’s not that difficult to buy into the premise and have fun with it.

Troll Hunter was made by an entirely Norwegian cast and crew so don’t expect to see any familiar faces or even hear any familiar words; the entire movie has subtitles.  What I enjoyed about this film so much was that it was perfectly toned.  By that I mean it’s done seriously and intensely as if these creatures are real and dangerous, however it knows it’s a movie about trolls and stays just tongue & cheek enough to not be too serious.  That’s not easy to do when you’re a fake documentary that is intended to be thrilling but about a goofy premise.  Some movies do it well like Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and some do not, like The Last Exorcism.

Troll Hunter features some scenes that are really funny but I can’t tell if that’s intended or just the nature of the mythology surrounding trolls.  Since this was made by Norwegians, I’m guessing it’s all actual lore.  Me second guessing them would be like telling a Scotsman he’s wrong about the Loch Ness Monster.  But what’s great is that the comedy is peppered in with scenes that carry with them some real tension when you come to grip with the danger these creatures pose.  It also does a great job of skirting around a low budget by using existing landmarks as part of the story that make you totally buy the concept (no spoiler alerts but I’ll never look at electrical lines the same way again).

Troll Hunter is a fantastic and fun concept that executed with great results from a filmmaking team that shows lots of potential.  I can only hope that they put out another film as fun as this soon but someone will take a chance and give them a much higher budget.

Troll Hunter (Rated R)
Gavin Grade: B+

For a solid year now movie nerds and fanboys have been drooling over the prospect of director Zach Snyder getting back in the business of kicking ass!  For some reason the man that brought us 300, Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen most recently gave us the children’s film Legends of the Guardian.  What?!  So it was a relief to most of us to see the trailer for Sucker Punch.  Hot girls dressed in sexy outfits shooting guns and kicking ass in a fantasy film about escaping reality while escaping an insane asylum.  I was hook-line-and-sinkered!  Sadly though, Sucker Punch was a giant, disjointed mess.

The film stars Emily Browning (The Uninvited, Lemony Snickets) as a wrongfully imprisoned girl who sinks into a fantasy world with her friends played by (the long time Gavin crush…call me, Jena) Jena Malone (Contact, Into the Wild), Abbie Cornish (Limitless, Bright Star) and Vanessa Hudgens who you either know from Disney’s High School Musical films or her naked pictures that leaked online.

Snyder’s trademark “look” to the film exists through the entire thing and it dazzles like it always does.  It’s colorful, exciting and dramatic.  The problem is that the story is a mixture of fanboy dribble and poor storytelling.  That could be that this is the first Zach Snyder movie that isn’t based on anything.  All his other films were either a remake, adapted from graphic novels or a children’s book.  He came up with Sucker Punch all by himself and it shows that he’s not ready to pen an original script.

It’s hard to keep track of what the hell is even going on in the film.  Reality gets blurred very quickly and I’m fine with that but you have to let us know what’s happening in the actual reality or we don’t care what happens to the characters in the non-reality.  There are fantasies within fantasies here and it’s not done cleverly like in Inception.  Not only do you quickly get lost but you find yourself rolling your eyes at how repetitive the damn thing gets.

Sucker Punch turns into a roulette wheel of nerdy action sequences that start, unfold and end exactly the same way each time and none of it is cool or exciting to anyone over the age of 14.  Zombie Nazis, fire-breathing dragons, faceless robots and enormous devil samurais are all in this movie in brainless and confusing fantasies that exist in the main characters head.  But if she’s a teenage girl why the hell is she thinking like a 14-year-old comic book nerd?

The best part of the film, besides the general look of it, is the performance that the villainous Oscar Isaac (Robin Hood, Body of Lies) gives.  He was fantastic in the film and makes me think that given enough time for his career to develop and put in the right movie, he could have Oscar-caliber chops…and I don’t mean his name.  But even his tour de force performance and my love for Jena Malone couldn’t hold my interest for this film.  Sorry Zach, but Sucker Punch was far from a knock out and just plain sucked.
Sucker Punch (Rated PG-13)
Gavin Grade: D+

“You’re as slow as molasses in January,” is an actual line uttered through an awful and fleeting southern accent by actress Kate Bosworth (Superman Returns, 21) and not only does it drip with Velveeta, but it could be a general thought for the whole film.  The Warrior’s Way is a Kung Fu/Western from first time director Sngmoo Lee.  Asian Cinema has always shared a kinship with the Western genre, but in the last year or so it seemed that over half of all the films coming out of Asia are either remakes of Westerns, take place in the American Old West or blend the two…much like The Warrior’s Way did.  That’s not a complain; it’s just an interesting observation.  The story for this is that of a Samurai assassin that refuses to kill a baby for his clan and takes the baby and hides in an old west town in California.  Not a bad story, but the promise of this film is action, action, action.  The payoff is goofy, plodding and dull.  Aside from Bosworth, Korean star Dong-gun Jan and Geoffry Rush (Pirates of the Caribbean, Munich) star in this mostly fantasy adventure that spends more time trying to show what a director can do with a Green Screen than what he can do with a story.  Full disclosure though, I’ve never been much of a fan of Asian Cinema.  I especially don’t like it when Asian actors attempt to speak English in the films and it’s told through an American filter.  I personally believe that it slows everything down and makes the film more of a parody or mockery than anything else.  I have several Asian movies in my collection at home but they’re all subtitled since I think that’s the only true way to get a quality performance out of the Asian actors.  This was the case with The Warrior’s Way and even when you surround Jan with decent actors who give it their all, especially Danny Huston (Wolverine, Children of Men) who never disappoints as a villain, it’s still not the pace that can hold my attention and make me glad I’m still watching.  However, I did take my friend Dave with me to see it.  Dave is a big Anime fan and liked the film.  He said the film screams Anime and even seems like still frames of animation at times that are more about the rich colors and imagery than they are about the story or dialogue.  Okay.  I can respect that.  Makes more sense to know that as oppose to wondering why it seems to be raining lotus petals in the middle of the California desert through most of the more dramatic scenes.  But even if you’re going to be a fun, don’t-take-it-too-seriously action film, I feel like there should be some actual action in it.  Lee confused body count with action,  Just because you can make a scene filled with killings doesn’t make it exciting to see.  When it comes down to it, this film is stylized for a certain audience and I just wasn’t it.  I’m also the same person who still can’t figure out why Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon got the Oscars it did.  One of the last lines of the movies, still covered in cheese and uttered through that same awful southern accent of Bosworth’s, was, “Is this the end or just the beginning?”  Ugh, as far as I’m concerned, I sure hope it’s the end.
The Warrior’s Way (Rated R)
Gavin Grade: D+

Here it is!  The moment we’ve all been waiting for!  This marks the beginning of the end.  Director David Yates, who’s taken the helm of the last few Potter films, made an inspired decision during the production of this movie – he went toe-to-toe with the studio and refused to shoot it in 3D.  Good for you, Yates!  The Harry Potter movies don’t need Hollywood’s trendy gimmick-of-the-month to put asses in seats or rake in the dough.  So why did you decided to split the last Harry Potter book into two films?  Don’t get me wrong; when the Deathly Hallows part 2 comes out and I can watch them back-to-back, I’ll be thrilled that they did.  But to release this as a singular movie doesn’t do much for the illiterate portion of the Potter fans that never read the books.  The movie follows JK Rowling’s last novel to an exceptional detail and still comes in at over two hours…yet is one of the shortest Potter films.  It follows Harry and the kids carrying on with the mission Dumbledore gave them before his death at the end of the last film.  It also really pushes the limits of that PG-13 rating with some deeply emotional scenes, sexual imagery and violence like we haven’t seen in the series yet.  Yeah, you can tell that this is the last one and it’s balls to the wall time!  I did read the book and found the first half to be almost dull at times.  Most of it seemed like it was spent trying to figure out how to kill Voldermort while hiding in the woods.  I’m glad my memory isn’t that great or Yates felt the same way I did because the first half of the Deathly Hallows movie is much more entertaining than I was expecting.  It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s thrilling and totally turns your crank for the next one (which comes out this summer).  However, it’s not complete and that’s the problem with the film.  You can’t look at this like the other Potter movies or even part of a saga like Kill Bill or Back to the Future or Star Wars.  Those are separate installments of a story that have a beginning, a middle and an end.  Sure they are trending toward a larger story, but each have climaxes within themselves.  The Deathly Hallows (the book) does as well…and holy crap is it ever a climax!  But half of it doesn’t.  By the time Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt. 1 comes to an end, you’re in tears and you’re amped up for more, but you feel unsatisfied because you only got half a movie.  It really is unfair to review this film at all.  Everyone involved did a great job.  Yates is continuing to see how dark and brilliant he can make a Harry Potter movie.  The acting from everyone is top notch like it always is and the kids (who are now all adults) are giving the best performances yet.  Even the familiar whimsical score was eerily absent from this film to let us know that this isn’t the Harry Potter we were introduced to a decade ago.  The only reason why this movie doesn’t work as well as it should is ONLY because it’s an incomplete story.  So that’s what I’m gonna give it…an I.  I know that’s a cop out but until The Deathly Hallows is REALLY complete, which happens in July, we’ll just have to make do with this.
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows part 1 (Rated PG-13)
Gavin Grade: I (but a B+ if I have to give it something)

Alice in Wonderland is the new film from director Tim Burton.  Tim Burton is a very funny director in the way that he’s reached levels of cult-like status and I’m not quite sure why.  There is this stigma about him that his movies are always amazing, weird and fantastic; that couldn’t be more wrong.  Burton gives us one good movie for every bad movie.  For every Big Fish, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Batman or Ed Wood he’s also given us Sleepy Hollow, Batman Returns, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and Planet of the Apes.  There was a lot of hype around Alice in Wonderland, which made me cautious to see it.  The good news is that it didn’t disappoint.  In fact it surpassed what I was expecting.  The problem the film is going to run into is the mass confusion from everyone who doesn’t know that it’s NOT the original Alice in Wonderland story; it’s the sequel.  In fact, by not naming the film Return to Wonderland or Alice 2 or maybe even the title of the actual sequel Through the Looking Glass, they’re going to create lots of disenchanted people who were expecting to see the classic Disney film but in dazzling live-action 3D.  You won’t…not really.  What you’ll see instead is a pretty creative story about Alice’s return to Wonderland to clean up the mess that has happened since her last visit.  This involves a storyline and action that is FAR from the traditional story.  In fact maybe a better title for this would be Alice in Narnia, since it’s much closer to those stories than Wonderland.  But it’s not all bad news.  Johnny Depp gives a great performance as The Mad Hatter, Helena Boham Carter is adequate as The Red Queen and the voice over work from great British actors is well casted and fun.  I especially liked seeing the insane Crispin Glover (Back to the Future, Charlie’s Angels) in this as a version of The Knave of Hearts that is nothing like the character from the book.  Mia Wasikowska (Defiance) plays Alice in an incredibly luke-warm, disenfranchised performance.  She’s so blank and vacant in this film that I almost wondering if Burton instructed her to be so since she thinks it’s a dream.  Either way, it doesn’t work and bothered me to have a lead that apathetic.  One aspect about the film that I really liked was how it was almost a film version of the Alice sequel, Through the Looking Glass.  Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter has a creepy split personality that comes out where he mumbles the Jabberwocky poem in a macabre Scottish accent.  This is a nod to author Lewis Carroll himself, who wrote the poem and included parts of it in the sequel.  This adds a tone of foreboding to the film that feels odd at first but I enjoyed.  I thought that was an interesting touch and what they did with it to make it more exciting and action-packed was well executed for the most part.  Alice in Wonderland is far from perfect and relies on gimicky 3D techniques that should be reserved for theme parks, but it’s fine enough to go in Tim Burton’s good column.  That must mean that what he does next will suck.
Alice in Wonderland (Rated PG)
Gavin Grade: B

Avatar might have been the most anticipated movie of 2009 and for good reasons.  I’ve heard that it cost somewhere between $300 – $500 million to make and has been what director, James Cameron, has been working on for the past ten years; his first since his last movie, Titanic.  Whenever that much hype gets put on something, it’s a very risky move.  On one hand you get the publicity you need to make sure asses get in seats, but on the other hand you better come through and deliver a movie that lives up to it.  Avatar cost so much money to make that it will be almost impossible to see huge profit numbers, so the only way it will be remembered as a success is by what people think of it and what awards it wins.   Cameron has made a staggeringly ambitious piece of fantasy that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.  The FX are so life-like and vivid that it’s impossible to tell what is fake and what is real.  The fact that it’s in 3D also helps to immerse you in a world that doesn’t exist; that world is a planet called Pandora.  Pandora is so amazingly real that it feels like you can almost smell the plants or feel the musty humidity in the air.  The 3D effects aid in the camera’s movement through lush jungles settings to give you the sense that you are ON this planet.  The colors are so vibrant that it is a breathtaking just to look at it, especially the nighttime sequences that look as if the entire planet is lit with a Black Light moon.  However, that’s where the creativity stops.  The inhabitants are called The Navi and are 10′ tall blue humans with cat faces.  All the animals on the planet are just like the ones we have here with minor changes.  There is no Star Wars originality when it comes to creatures in this.  And that lack of creativity expands to the story as well, which is one you’ve seen a million times before in other sweeping epics, except this time there are blue people involved.  However, I kind of like the fact that Cameron chose such a generic story to tell the tale.  The story makes absolutely no effort to hide its message of Imperialism.  The overt story echoes the annihilation of the Native Americans, their land and culture.  Their even called the Navi for God’s sake, but if that’s too cryptic the Navi even look, talk and act like Native Americans.  But hidden in that story are also political statements about environmentalism, the war on terror, the Vietnam & Iraq Wars, over-zealous military leaders and the bleeding of natural resources.  But don’t worry, it’s only a political movie in disguise.  In actuality it’s a 160 minute-long, brightly colored, emotional fantasy adventure filled with FX that amaze the senses and has one of the greatest battle sequences of 2009…just too bad it’s a story we’ve heard far too many times.
Avatar (Rated PG-13)
Gavin Grade: B+

Apparently this is the first movie in a gothic book series for teens called “Cirque du Freak.”  The series has its fans but I can’t imagine it being very popular since I never even heard of it before.  I’m not sure if the book jumped on the vampire bandwagon or it preceded it, but the movie clearly was made to strike while the fanged-iron is hot.  The story is about a young boy who becomes (you guessed it) assistant to a vampire who travels with a Freak Show after he reluctantly sucked (ha) into a world of feuding ghouls.  Imagine “Harry Potter” meets “Twilight” only with a lot more silliness.  Acting veteran John C. Reilly stars as the vampire Larten Crepsley.  I love Reilly and think he never gets the credit he deserves.  He’s proved his dramatic chops (“The Hours”), his comedic chops (“Walk Hard”) and even his musical ones (“Chicago”) but never gets the accolades.  In “The Vampire’s Assistant” he doesn’t get to use much of any of those chops though.  This film has such a horrible script that it doesn’t give the actors a chance to do much of anything with it; even with great performers peppered in like Salma Hayek, Willem Dafoe, and Ken Watanabe.  But even if the script was penned by Shakespeare himself, the star of the film who’s a newcomer named Chris Massoglia, would still find a way to make it look like high school theater.  I’m not sure who’s nephew, son or friend’s cousin he is, but how he landed this gig is a mystery to me.  He is absolutely terrible!  He plays through the different scenes that involve action, comedy, horror, drama and suspense with the same dumbfounded, wallpaper face that makes you think you’re being punked by sitting through a movie with him as the star.  But I did think the same thing of Daniel Radcliffe when I saw him in the first “Harry Potter” movie though and he got better.  I do hope that this movie does well enough to earn the sequels it has planned.  The story and characters are engaging, dark, funny and odd.  It’s the kind of movie that I would’ve loved as a 13-year-old.  I’m interested in what comes next and I want to see how it all plays out.  This first film in the episodic story is all set up and no conclusion, but is different enough to at least keep me watching to see where it goes from here.  (Of course I could read the books, but who wants to do that.)  It intrigues with questions but doesn’t answer any.  In a way I’m glad that it’s not super great or ultra compelling because that would just be torture to have to wait for the next one.  So in that respect I’m thankful, but taking what I imagine is a very engrossing, fun gothic teen tale and watering it down to this, I am not.
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (Rated PG-13)
Gavin Grade: C+

Director Spike Jonze is a really weird guy.  He’s done movies like “Being John Malkovich” and music videos for Weezer, Beastie Boys and Fatboy Slim.  His latest is “Where the Wild Things Are” and has been struggling to get this movie made for years.  He was a huge fan of the Maurice Sendak children’s story, as was I.  He wanted to make sure this beloved story was done justice and done right.  I’m really sorry to say that if he thinks it was done justice and right then I wish the project was never made.  One of the biggest fears that I have when I hear a children’s book is being made into a feature film is that they’re going to add so much to the story that what you loved as a kid is merely a shell of what it’s become.  Not only did that happen here, but what I loved as a kid was recognizable ONLY by the visuals on the screen.  Jonze and co-writer, David Eggers, managed to take a children’s story and craft a deeply confusing and manically emotional story out of what was originally an 8 sentence storybook.  Now I don’t think that that’s a bad idea, but boy did they miss the mark.  I saw this with my fiance who has a Masters in analyzing literature and extracting meaning from stories and she didn’t get it.  I didn’t get it either.  And boy will your kids not get it.  It’s rated “PG” but don’t let that fool you – this is not a kid’s movie.  Not because it’s too scary or violent (which it actually might be for some) but because it’s dull, slow and WAY over the heads of kids.  And that’s fine with me, but it’s way over the heads of adults too.  There’s no resolution, nothing is learned and characters have no arcs or motives.  So disappointing since I really wanted to like this movie.  Not just because I loved the book as a kid, but also because the trailers released for it almost brought me to tears.  The only positive thing I can say about the movie is that Jonze’s ability to translate his imagination to things you can actually see is amazing.  The sets are incredible and the use of such diverse landscapes of nature and phases of the sun gave the movie a real organic feel that helped you buy into the fantasy.  But the costumes are the crown jewel.  Newcomer Max Records (who plays “Max”) is acting beyond his years and to do it to 12′ high, fuzzy costumes with CGI faces is even more impressive.  The voice work of Paul Dano (“There Will Be Blood”), Catherine O’Hara (“Orange County”) and James Gandolfini (“The Sopranos”) is so convincing, you’d think it was them in make-up (even though Gandolfini just plays the bipolar Tony Soprano all over again, only this time he’s fuzzy and adorable.)  However those are the only positive things I can say about this boring, plodding movie that is too childish for adults, too adult for children and too odd for everyone.  But oh well, at least I tried to end on a happy note, which is more than I can say for the film.
Where the Wild Things Are (Rated PG)
Gavin Grade: C

This was the first “Potter” movie I saw where I had the entire book read before I saw the movie.  That makes my enjoyment of the Harry Potter world much more enjoyable but it does make it harder to watch the movies from a critical view.  I really will attempt to review this movie as JUST A MOVIE and not based off of my captivation of the books.  The director of this one (the last one, and the last two also) is David Yates.  I was not a fan of his, but anyone who comes after accomplished director of the 3rd one, Alfonso Cuaron, must understand that it’s not easy to improve on his work.  However, he does a wonderful job of directing this one.  It gives me hope for the last two (the last book is split into two movies).  He has really made a worthy effort to keep the angles and shots in this movie complex and dazzling, while also matching the colors and editing with the bleak story and maturity of the characters.  Speaking of the characters, the entire cast returns for this one with the addition of Jim Broadbent, who is brilliant as Prof. Slughorne, and Jessie Cave as the lovestruck, Lavender Brown.  They blend right in with the rest of the cast as if they’ve been there all along, but both easily steal the show with their brand of humor, which there was plenty of!  This might be the first “Potter” film that made me laugh out loud at genuinely funny performances.  But I wonder if trying to put too much of that into the movie made them take their eye off the ball by focusing on more of the character-driven adolescent nuances than the mystery and adventure surrounding the ending of the film.  That’s my only complaint with this movie.  They took out, what I consider to be, key scenes that explain Harry and Dumbledore’s quest.  Those scenes would have kept the movie darker and mysterious, while satisfying fans’ thirst for glimpses into Voldemort’s past.  Damnit!  I couldn’t do it.  I tried not to, but I’m reviewing it as a movie from a book instead of JUST A MOVIE.  Ignorance might be bliss when seeing these because if you don’t know a scene exists, you’ll never miss it when it’s taken out.  As a fan of JUST THE MOVIE, it is the best in what is arguably shaping up to be one of the greatest movie series of all time.  As a fan of the movies based on books that I love, it’s a wonderful and heartbreaking setup to what I hope will be the climax ending we all hope it should be…it just could’ve had a little more.
Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince (Rated PG)
Gavin Grade: A