Montag's Movie Reviews

Ok, first of all, I need to clear the air about something: yes, Avatar has the same basic premise as the 1990 Kevin Costner film Dances With Wolves. However, and that's a big however, pointing that fact out as if it were some sort of impediment to the movie and as if you were somehow clever and intelligent is completely false. The fact is that yes, this storytelling convention has been used several times before: outsider joins indigenous people to better understand them so they can be defeated, falls for tribe member/becomes engrossed in the culture and decides to switch sides (circa dances with wolves, the last samurai, the last of the Mohicans, the new world, etc.). What the aforementioned fallacy illustrates is an inability to recognize that storytelling conventions are not always bad things, and used properly can actually make the story more accessible to an audience and save you lots of time on unnecessary exposition. Lets all face it, we could all do with a bit less unnecess...

You might be wondering why I took so long after this movie was released to review it, that's because it wasn't released everywhere at the same time. This movie didn't come to my area until this week. Oh well, limited releases and all that. Ok, so first off let me dispel a lot of hate speech people have been putting out concerning this movie, it's not bad, not horrible, not awful. What it is could best be described with the use of a single word: schizophrenic. Bear in mind: crazy is not always a bad thing, Vincent van Gogh was arguably pretty nuts and that worked out pretty well for him, at least from a historical and artistic perspective. So while this movie isn't BAD, it is nuts, but it does manage to take the pigskin of lunacy and run with it. There have been endless complaints by people comparing this movie to the first and while those arguments would be valid with most sequels like the matrix trilogy where the quality steadily and systematically went down in a...

"Where The Wild Things Are" may be rated PG, but it's not a kids movie. I'm not even sure it's an adults movie frankly. Spike Jonze takes whatever nostalgia you had for Maurice Sendak's novel and slowly grinds it into the salt and glass-shard encrusted ground while spritzing you with a bottle of lemon juice. It captures all the joy you never had of going through a terrible divorce as a child and compresses it into two incredibly miserable hours. Completing the 'nasty divorce as seen through a child's eyes' allegorical tale is the amazing voice acting, of which I wish there had been none. It really made you feel like your parents were arguing and yelling right there in the theater and you happened to be eight again. Inane arguments that make no sense to a child, miserable lame excuses as to why two people who seemed so in love can no longer be together, etc, etc, etc. Go watch the latest Saw movie. You'll feel better, both in general, and about ...

Tinseltown has failed to produce a real hit this year and G. I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra is no exception. Sure Angels & Demons came close to being a home run, if only an infield one. Even the much hyped Watchmen suffered from a badly edited theatrical cut as LA continues to dump on itself, licking its wounds from last year's strikes and this year's recession. G. I. Joe isn't anything new or spectacular; it is, in fact, quite the opposite: overused CGI, actors chosen for looks, not ability; too many plot lines that turns into tiring exposition; lots of pointless effects; unneeded comedic relief; pointless love interests and plenty of eye candy. The first clue that this movie was going to be a waste of time was Dennis Quaid is featured prominently in the trailer as General Hawk. Quaid must have thought this would be his redemption movie that would turn his career as audiences saw him in a new light, much like what Stranger Than Fiction did for Will Ferral, but alas, t...

Inglorious Basterds is Tarantino's latest film, and given how awesome some of his past films have been, I was pretty psyched about seeing it. When I left the theater though, my opinion of the movie was 'meh'. Sure, it has some great moments, and there's certainly a few hilarious scenes, and plenty of suspense. But it drags on, and it seems to be uncertain when to be serious and when to treat it all as one great big joke. Everything is a caricature of a caricature. When it's good, it's great. But when it's bad, it's just tiring. And it's bad more often than it's good. The movie looks great. The acting is... Well, all the actors are great at what they've been told to do. It's just what they've been told to do doesn't make for that good of a movie in the end. Long story short, the movie isn't anything special. It's an amazingly violent fairy tale painted with strokes of WWII, with no connection to historical fact (not that it...

I'm with on the false advertising in trailers thing: I think that studios that snooker you into the theater via false advertising in their trailers ought to have to pay out punitive damages in a class action lawsuit. All of the good shots of Public Enemies was in the trailer. Michael Mann owes me $10.50 for a midnight ticket after being drawn, beaten, horsewhipped, set on fire and quartered. I demand that Universal personally send Johnny Depp with my refund check, even though he and Christian Bale were the only things right wit the movie. There's very little good to say about this movie. I can't recall a lick of the score because it all sounded like source music. The only recognizable piece of music in the film is Otis Taylor's Ten Million Slaves which, if you don't buy the linked single, you get forced into buying the the whole damned album . For whatever insane reason, Director Michael Mann decided to film on cheap digital cameras.It's impossible to tell ...

While Ron Howard's latest excursion into the religious surreal is, without question, a high-tension, fast-paced thriller, Angels & Demons is, nevertheless, created with human hands--and the flaws show. Though Dan Brown attempted to pass himself off as an intellectual atheist on a mission with The DaVinci Code , receiving praise and accolades from today's so-called progressives, Angels & Demons reveals Mr. Brown as a lowly writer because Angels & Demons fits together too conveniently, ultimately leaving the audience saying, "Of course that couldn't have happened! It's just a movie." THe main contrast between Angels & Demons and DaVinci Code is that Angels & Demons is very respectful to religion in general and Catholics specifically whereas DaVinci Code is purely atheistic volley designed to destroy Christendom. Ewan McGregor was perfectly cast as Camerlengo. Everything about McGregor's performance, yes, even his accent is perfect...

Terminator Salvation is surprisingly good. Given the disappointingly forgettable summer popcorn flick that was Terminator 3, the fourth title in the series didn't give one hope of being much better. Worrisome things like the fact that McG, the new director 's most notable movie was " Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle " didn't help either. The fact that the credited writers were the geniuses behind the appalling Terminator 3 script really made it seem like an abandon-all-hope scenario. An audio recording of Christian Bale losing his temper on set was fairly amusing, but definitely not reassuring in any fashion. Given all of this, I went into the theater with fairly low expectations, and came out stunned and impressed by what I'd seen. Certainly stunned by the fact that the movie was almost just as good as T2 had been. Impressed by how well everything had been done - the writing, acting, effects and the entire movie overall. The scope of the movie's post-...

I'm going to go out on a limb and make a prediction about the new Terminator movie: I think that it will be boring and halfway through it, people will start quoting the Christian Bale rant. What say you? You heard it here first on Montag's Reviews.

My god Jim! It's full of lens flare! The first few mentions I heard of the new Star Trek movie didn't really bode well for it. A prequel? With 'younger versions' of Spock and Kirk? Directed by J.J. Abrams? Star Trek meets Lost? Oh my. This can't end well. The funny thing was, it did. It even broke the curse of the odd-numbered Star Trek movies being worse than the even numbered ones. Not only was it good, it was surprisingly good. It's possibly the second or third best Star Trek film ever, actually. Which is really impressive, frankly. Aside from a few minor annoyances, like the heavy use and abuse of lens flares ( apparently everything in the future is so bright it causes lens flares. That's how you know it's the future ! ) So what's the move like overall? Click below to read the rest of the review and find out! The movie follows Kirk and Spock as they grow up, and it's pretty funny at times, especially as you see hints of the people they will ...

State of Play delivers on its promise to aspiring journalists to get adrenaline pumping and imaginations running wild as the viewer is treated to what it must be like to work a "real" story in a big metro. Crowe's character Cal is a seasoned, "old-time" reporter i.e. print media. Rachel McAddams' (who will forever be known as "the chick from The Notebook ") Della Frye is a snippy blogger who churns out more content more often than Cal. Though Della is labeled as unseasoned, this relationship isn't played up like a buddy-cop franchise, vis-à-vis Lethal Weapon . Cal's a-long-time-ago roommate--now Senator Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck)--is today's news topic after his Monica Lewniski young, attractive intern is found to be murdered. When Senator Collins shows up on Cal's doorstep that evening, the race is on at the Washington Globe to get the whole story. Instead of taking up his boss' suggestion of bringing in another seasoned r...

I recently got around to watching " A Waltz with Bashir " and while it was a powerful and well made film about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, at the end of it, I was unhappy with the film because intellectually, it did not have anything to say about the horrors that had occurred. It recounted the experiences of one man dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder that he suffered from as a result of participating in the fighting, but past that, it did not have anything to say of weight about the events, beyond perhaps ' humans are good at killing each other, one revenge inciting the opposite side to do the same '. By the end of the film, it's just the feel-bad movie of the year, and you feel if there was nothing of worth to take from the film. Not that there has to be a positive message. Or a negative one. Just *any* message of *any* intellectual depth. If you make a movie about explosions, no one expects Shakespeare. If you make a movie about events you compare to ...

Professor Tom has kindly joined the blog, and given how often I manage to write a new movie review, this is definitely a good thing. He's someone that can write a good entertaining review that isn't the equivalent of a scene-by-scene post-mortem by the assistant director or a lovely informative one-liner like "THIS MOVIE RAWKS! GO SEE IT!" Montag's Movie Reviews - we'll make you laugh, and we'll make you laugh even harder after you've seen the movie or your money back.

The market's being flooded with comic book graphic novel-based films. Given the ever increasing offering, how do you if the latest one is right for you? ProfessorTom lets you in on the inside scoop of Zack Snyder's Watchmen. I had no idea what to expect from Watchmen as my only connection to the material prior to the movie was through the teaser with the Smashing Pumpkins' The Beginning is the end is the Beginning . I knew from the trailer that there was once a group called Watchmen who defended the city back in the 30's but they were long gone. One of them had been killed, so solving that mystery and avenging the murder was the premise of the film. When we got to the theater, there were signs in the window warning that Watchmen had been rated R for intense violence and explicit sexuality, almost as if the film should have gotten an NC -17. Immediately, i was reminded of the Sin City debacle, namely, the alleged theater in Texas that only took cash because there ...