Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Summer's Here

The summer movie season has arrived and I'm gearing up for the best and the worst! I plan on composing reviews for the lot of them, but at the moment I'll just share my first impressions:




Star Trek - I'll be shocked if anything this summer comes close to being as good as this. Even better than people say, A.








X-Men Origins: Wolverine - The film starts off promising, but quickly deteriorates into something cheap and ridiculous (even by comic-book standards), C-.





Night at the Museum 2: Battle For the Smithsonian - I actually quite like the first "Museum" flick, but this wasn't even enjoyable. Any avenues the film could have taken to save itself were swiftly abandoned. However, Amy Adams earns this film a slight boost, C-.






Up - This film proves that I'm not prejudiced against Pixar Films. It may seem like heresy, but I typically don't like their films and this year's effort had an uphill battle getting me to enjoy it. "Up" is a beautiful, poignant, and genuinely hilarious piece of animation. Pixar's best to-date, A.




Terminator: Salvation - This was certainly a disappointment. I've been looking forward to a post-apocalyptic Terminator story since I was just a child. The trailers had me convinced that this might be good. Early reviews made me more skeptical, but I still wanted to see it. It wasn't a bad film (certainly not good though), but it doesn't commit to the vision set forth by James Cameron with the first two installments. Very tame, what I'd call apocalypse-light. Also, a lot doesn't make sense. The PG-13 rating probably didn't help. C.