Zombieland

Living in a world surrounded by zombies doesn’t sound entertaining-but in Zombieland it is! The movie revolves around four main characters; Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) who end up working as a team to find a place where the “infection“ hasn’t spread. This movie had me either laughing till I almost cried or squinting my eyes from the gruesome blood splattering throughout the entire movie.

There are rules for surviving Zombieland which Columbus had come up with. The list goes down to about #33, so I will only name out the beginning and of course which were my favorite:

Columbus ends up walking across states to get to Columbus, Ohio in order to reunite with his family when he comes across Tallahassee; as you can tell by the name he is driving to Tallahassee, Florida. They both agree to travel together but there is only one problem with Tallahassee; he is food motivated and stops at stores in hopes of finding the last Twinkie. While in search of a Twinkie, they come across two sisters Wichita and Little Rock who end up being experienced con-artists. As you probably guessed, they end up teaming up with the sisters. There is a small part of the movie where it is a little slow (about 5 minutes) because it is showing the chemistry build-up between Wichita and Columbus.

The end of the movie takes place in an amusement park with an ultimate showdown. As soon as I saw this I was thinking “Zombieland the videogame“�! This movie is definitely a must see. The cast for the movie was awesome; I was laughing throughout the entire movie and the cameo by Bill Murray was hilarious as well. Even though Jesse Eisenberg did a great job with Columbus’s character I could still see Michael Cera from Superbad playing that role. Other than that, you do not want to go up against a man who wants a Twinkie and remember another rule: Buckle up!

I give it a 5 out of 5.

Pandorum

Pandorum is frustratingly close to being a decent sci-fi action movie except for one minor little detail: the screenplay. Directed by German helmer Christian Alvert, who’s got a string of psychological thrillers to his name, and written by Travis Milloy (the two share story credit), the film strangles, bludgeons, and ultimately kills its own premise, draining the life from a concept already close to flatlining and ruining what could have been a solid B picture with a repetitive, disjointed script that tries to stitch together too many ungainly ideas. Genre fiction tends to recycle a lot of ideas — in Pandorum’s case, a deep-space mission to colonize a new planet after ours runs out of room — and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. A big idea like that can have the meat stripped from the bone in dozens of ways. But Pandorum just takes bits and pieces from other sci-fi thrillers and cobbles them together, and the two main ideas that are supposed to provide narrative thrust and identity don’t even connect or need to inhabit the same story. There was so much potential in the first few minutes, but the film gave it all away.

After a familiar but welcoming prologue that spells out the perils of future Earth and the launch of the ship Elysium in 2174 to colonize the hospitable planet Tanis, the action cuts to the claustrophobic sleep chamber of Corporal Bower (Ben Foster), who’s been living in suspended animation and has now been painfully awakened by the ship’s computer systems. It’s a tense, disorienting scene, and cinematographer Wedigo von Schultzendorff does a good job capturing the grime of the lived-in ship, bathed in low emergency lights and pocket neon glowsticks. Bower’s mind has been glazed over by the hibernation, and he doesn’t remember much more than his name by the time he wakes up Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid) in an adjoining capsule. These early moments are the film’s best, when the story is still working under the genuine suspense of the unknown, but already Alvert’s relying too heavily on Michl Britch’s constant score (this is their fourth film together) and the erratic editing of Philipp Stahl and Yvonne Valdez. Alvert’s problem is that he almost never bothers to establish basic geography within a scene, so characters can arrive at doors or climb up into air ducts with no prompting and no way for the viewer to have followed the action. This is damaging from the start, since the tight dimensions of the sleeping quarters and adjoining computer room don’t need a lot of fancy tricks to be felt, but it’s going to be an even bigger problem later on, when chase and fight scenes become almost dazzlingly hard to follow and, worse, boring. Communicating spaces in a movie like this one is how viewers get involved or terrified or riveted, but too often Pandorum relies on cuts and jump-scares.

Finding most of the ship’s power offline, including the doors, Bower and Payton are trapped inside the prep room, so Bower shimmies out an air duct and eventually makes his way to an external deck. Everything’s dark and deserted, and Bower has no idea what happened to the passengers and crew or how long they’ve been traveling. From there, his hope — and, briefly, mine — is to make it to the reactor bay to fix the ship’s decaying system and save the day. Hero A, meet Goal B, and commence journey. The problem is that the narrative then splinters into two threads that never meet up. On one hand, Bower and Payton are on the lookout for signs of pandorum, a kind of deep-space sickness marked by paranoia and homicidal tendencies that can be triggered by severe emotional trauma. On the other, Bower isn’t out in the ship two minutes when he sees a group of monsters run past, big, ugly humanoid things with elongated skulls and pale skin who hunt in vicious packs and carry blue lights and torches for no reason except so they can be easily identified by the viewer from a distance. This isn’t a spoiler: The monsters are humans who’ve inexplicably mutated thanks to an injection that was supposed to help them adapt to life on Tanis but went pretty horribly awry. Why/how/when? Not answered. More importantly, the random monsterism and the random space-madness are not at all related. Either one would have worked just fine as an engine of conflict and danger: Bower must watch out for super mutants while avoiding his own mental breakdown; or Bower must contend with potentially succumbing to pandorum while fighting off those killers who already have. But Alvart and Milloy’s story wants to wed these two disparate plots in an unholy marriage of style over substance, and the resulting choppy film feels disconnected from itself.

From there to the end, the film divides its energies between Bower’s journey through the ship with a couple other survivors he meets along the way and Payton’s attempts to help and monitor things while stuck in the control room. Quaid is in gruff commanding officer mode and could do a movie like this in his sleep, but Foster is a watchable and interesting performer, and he carries the film as far as it will go. Unfortunately, Pandorum doesn’t know what to do with itself, and when it isn’t blindly pretending like its two subplots are connected, it’s cribbing from every other space thriller, from Alien to Serenity to the execrable Event Horizon. (It makes sense that the latter was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, one of Pandorum’s producers.) Worst of all, there are a couple of legitimately well-executed twists at the end, and you can’t help but wonder what the film would have been like if the creative focus had been on gut-shots like those instead of polishing a bad product. We’ll never know.

I give it a 3 out of 5.

The Hangover

Mr. Helms is the anxious, nerdy dude, a dentist only because making him an accountant would deprive the film of a choice tooth-extraction gag, who lives in cowering terror of his bossy, judgmental girlfriend (Rachel Harris). Mr. Galifianakis is the childlike loser whose borderline-creepy non sequiturs are more hilarious the less sense they make. But it is Mr. Cooper who offers the most interesting variation on an old standard, playing his aggressive, cocky frat boy with a snarl of rage that masks an anxiety as hard to account for as it is to miss.

These three “ Stu (Mr. Helms), Phil (Mr. Cooper) and Alan (Mr. Galifianakis) “ drive to Las Vegas from Los Angeles with another buddy, Doug (Justin Bartha), who seems much better adjusted than the others, which is to say blander and duller, and who mercifully vanishes for most of the picture. Doug is about to get married, and a wild bachelor weekend spins out of control.

Phil, Stu and Alan wake up to find their luxury suite at Caesars Palace a shambles, with a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet and a chicken scratching around the detritus of what looks to have been quite a bacchanal. Stu has a missing incisor, Phil has a hospital bracelet around his wrist, and Doug is nowhere to be found. What on earth could have happened?

In answering that question “The Hangover“ peaks early and runs out of steam long before the end. This is probably inevitable, since even the craziest stuff has a way of becoming less so in the course of being explained. Still, there are some moments of dizzying, demented lunacy, most of them immune to being spoiled by mere verbal description. (The verbal jokes I will leave for you to discover and repeat with your co-workers in the break room.)

Mike Tyson shows up to sing along with a Phil Collins song. Mr. Galifianakis is tasered. So are the other two. By schoolchildren on a field trip. Have I ruined anything? No, I’ve just whetted your appetite.

But true to its title, “The Hangover“ goes down smoothly enough and then kicks you in the head later on, when you start to examine the sources of your laughter. There’s the easy, lazy trafficking in broad ethnic caricature — Mike Epps as a black drug dealer, Ken Jeong as a prancing, lisping Asian gangster known as Mr. Chow — which is decked out in flimsy air quotes to make it seem as if the movie is making fun of racism.

And the movie, for all its queasiness about male bodies and the thin line between friendship and, you know, other stuff, can’t be called homophobic either. It is much more panicked by the idea of heterosexuality, from whose terrors and traps the whole Vegas adventure is an escape. The city itself is not a place of sin but rather, for Stu, Phil and Alan, an Eden of the narcissistic, infantile id.

Alan, in spite of his heavy beard, is almost literally a giant baby, his soft-bellied body appearing swaddled in a sheet and, most memorably, in a jockstrap that looks like a badly applied diaper. Until the end credits — which shuffle through still photographs from a harder-edged, more nastily and candidly adult movie — the on-screen nudity consists of male buttocks and a woman’s breast in the mouth of a nursing infant. This pretty much sums up the movie’s psychosexual condition, which old-school Freudians might identify as pregenital, more preoccupied with eating and elimination than with, you know, other stuff.

The tiny handful of women who have speaking roles in “Hangover“� may at first seem to be conventional figures in the straight-male imaginary — the sweet and patient bride; the emasculating, hypocritical shrew; the friendly prostitute (a sunny Heather Graham) — but they are all really incarnations of mommy. There is a bad mommy who won’t let you play, a good mommy who cleans up your mess and kisses your boo-boos and an extra special mommy who offers you her nipple even when you don’t pay for it as most of the other kids do. What hangover? This movie is safe as milk.

I give it a 4 out of 5.