Griff The Invisible

Well this was interesting. It starts off following suit with superhero themes. Griff is a small meager man who gets picked on at work. He doesn’t like his job and he stays to himself. Then we learn that Griff used to be a superhero and hes trying to hide the fact that hes still a crime fighter by night.

The audience gets thrown into a scene of Griff saving a woman and fighting off evil. Then its back to work and the same old stuff.

Griff’s apartment houses a top of the line computer installation alerting him of trouble. Oddly there isn’t much to hide his super tech setup…and his suit is just hidden by a curtain…whats going on here?

Turns out, Griff is making all of this up in his head. The audience sees what Griff is thinking in his head throughout the film and its not until the end that we realize that his awesome suit…its not so awesome. His hightech computer setup…its really just some old crappy monitors sat on top of each other. And all of his tricks that he pulls at work aren’t really as good as he thinks they are.

Its an odd kind of movie, where you’re never really quite sure whats going on until the end…and by that time its a pretty big let down.

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Dave: 2 out of 5 Edwards
Eddie: 3.5 out of 5 Edwards

2011 Recap

The end of the year is upon us. There are a ton of reviews in our queue and some of these have been waiting to hit publish for a long long time. So, We’re clearing out the queue of everything we’ve watch in 2011 that hasn’t been published and we’ll start off 2012 fresh.

Here is a quick Yes/No/Meh rating on what we’ve seen this year that hasn’t been put out yet. If you have recommendations for 2012, leave them in the comments section.

Red State

NO, creepy, dark and violent. It’s interesting because its probably not THAT far off from a lot of people in the news but its not a fun creepy.

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Captain America

YES, but mainly because it ties into the Avengers

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Win Win

YES, Paul Giammati…thats it. It stars paul Giammati, I don’t need to tell you anything else.

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Ides of March

YES. I’m quickly becoming a huge ryan gosling fan. This is a quality political thriller that thankfully avoids getting all the actual politics involved with making this a great movie.

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Red

MEH

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Sexy Beast

MEH

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The Adjustment Bureau

NO, too many unanswered questions and loose ends and not enough info about what the hell is going on to be good. If they spent another 30 minutes developing the story, this could have been really good.

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Cedar Rapids

YUP – cause its funny

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No Strings Attached

NOPE, cause it sucked

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Nightmares In Red, White and Blue

YES, not a ‘Great’ documentary but one of the most intersting things I learned is how horror movies reflect what society is going through. Interesting.

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Confidence

YES, this should have received a lot more attention than it did. By me and the theaters.

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The North Face

YES, but only if you’re bundled up…better yet, wait till its summer and you’re dying of heat exhaustion. Then watch it…it will cool you off. (these guys are amazing)

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The Transcendant Man

YES – everyone should watch this.

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Paul

YES, cause these guys are hillarious. This isn’t there best but its better than most of everything else.

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Water For Elephants

YES, good story, better book.

Everything Must Go | Including This Movie

This was a bit of a dissapointment. One of my all time favorite movies is Stranger Than Fiction, one of Will Ferrells few dramatic roles. I had high hopes that this might be on the same level. Unfortunately this didn’t come close to the witty and fun Stranger Than Fiction. Instead it was slow…and awkward for the audience. Ferrell plays an alcoholic who loses his job because of his drinking problem and who gets locked out of his house because of his drinking and ends up getting a divorce, again because of his drinking problem.

He ends up sitting on his lawn for days going through withdrawls from alcohol, which is not fun to watch. He also takes advantage of a neighborhood kid who ends up riding his bike down that street everyday with nothing better to do than be taken advantage of. It’s not until the very end of the movie, that Ferrell character starts to sober up and clean up his situation.

All the humorous back and forths in the trailer are really…all the funny parts of the movie, everything else is slow and depressing.

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Rating:
Dave: 2.5 out of 5 Edward’s
Eddie: 2 out of 5 Edward’s

The Raid | Tuesday Trailerday

Waiting For Superman |How Does This Happen?

These kids who are dropping out, aren’t dropping out to be screen writers

This is a powerful movie. I don’t even have kids but it still makes you sad, angry, frustrated and a little optimistic at the same time. Waiting for Superman gives shocking stats about school districts around the country. It follows five different parents/kids vying for an opportunity to leave the public school system and win the lottery for a private charter school. Which at first might sounds like some spoiled families who just want their kids to go to some fancy private school but then you hear about the ‘drop out factories’ that some of these kids are about to enter and you learn about how much better these charter schools are and it’s literally shocking. These kids aren’t winning a lottery to go to a better school. They’re winning a lottery to save their lives…its like a real world version of The Hunger Games.

How can people, specifically the President of one of the teachers unions who was featured in the movie, live with themselves KNOWING (and they can actually prove this with statistics) that the teachers and system that they support is deteriorating our society (not all but a lot). It’s also incredibly frustrating and disheartening to hear that these same groups are some of the largest contributors to political campaigns. Politics aside, how does an teachers organization have enough money to be one of the largest donors to political parties? Does that make any sense?

At the end of the film you see the parents and kids as they wait for the lottery to end. You wait for their number to get called, and for most of the kids it didn’t get called, you can’t help but feel like winning this lottery is almost like winning the game of life. It sounds cheesy but with the data that supports the potential that these kids could have in these private schools compared with what they will more than likely have if they enter the school they are supposed to enter. You feel like that persons future suddenly looks so dim in comparison.

It all sounds very drastic and maybe it is but there is probably another side to this story and a compelling reason in favor of public schools (obviously not all public schools are bad and some of the absolute worst schools were featured in this movie). There are also dozens of outside factors that determine if any of those kids would end up being successful or even make it out of their rough neighborhoods. Regardless it makes me glad that I don’t have kids yet and I don’t have to think about this.

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Rating:
Dave: 4 out of 5 Edward’s
Eddie: 4.5 out of 5 Edward’s