Tag Archives: Cobble Hill Cinemas

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Life Of Pi – Review

4/5 – Ang Lee earned his Best Director Oscar

With less than eight hours to go before the start of the Oscars, I upped the number of Best Picture nominees I had seen by one by catching an early afternoon showing of Life of Pi. It’s good we showed up early, because it looked like everyone in the vicinity of Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill Cinemas had the same idea.

Before the movie began, the old lady sitting behind me decided to walk her husband through the entire story of the movie in her loud old lady voice. Thanks, lady, you rock. I haven’t read the book, so I thought about turning around and yelling “Dobby dies in book 7!” at Madame de Spoiler. Instead, headphones went in, Foo Fighters came on, and spoilers were avoided. I have to admit, I considered keeping Foo Fighters going a little longer when I saw the first trailer was for the latest  Fast and Furious movie.

Life of Pi started, and despite the constant running commentary from the old lady behind me (She loves meer cats! Tigers are scary!), it was a really good movie. First off, it’s beautifully shot, and the 3D looks awesome. This is the best 3D I’ve seen in a live action movie since Avatar. But unlike Avatar, everything doesn’t look like it’s CGI. Oh, a lot of this movie is CGI, but it doesn’t have that telltale fake look that CGI usually has. I was surprised to find out that the tiger in Life of Pi, Richard Parker, was a CG creature throughout the entire movie. I thought they used an actual tiger for at least some of the scenes.

Cesi n’est pas un tigre.

Life of Pi walks the line between endearing and tragic so well, and that’s what I think is the main reason why I liked it so much. Pi goes through an experience that rivals Job’s, but the movie never turns into maudlin naval gazing. Instead, it’s lifted by by its heartwarming and humorous parts.

I’m glad Ang Lee won the Best Director Oscar for Life of Pi. With Kathryn Bigelow and Ben Affleck both snubbed for Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, I was happy to see it go to Ang Lee for Life of Pi over Steven Spielberg for Lincoln.

See Life of Pi in the theater, and see it in 3D. The shots of the movie during the Oscars didn’t look quite as magical in 2D on my home TV as they did in 3D in the theater.

Parting thought: Gerard Depardieu is a jerk.

Jerk.
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At The Theater #18: Date Night

I should have known that Date Night was going to be a disappointment right at the first scene. Steve Carell, playing New Jersey accountant Phil Foster, is in a meeting with that annoying SNL couple that call each other babe all the time and ignores whoever they’re talking to. A couple of questions: Does anyone anywhere find these characters funny on SNL? Does even Jason Sudeikis hate these characters enought that they had to replace him from a role he started on SNL?

Speaking of SNL, Kristin Wiig also has a minor part in the movie. You might not recognize her, because she’s not playing the Target Lady. Until now I was convinced that the Target Lady was the only character Kristin Wiig could play. I can’t be the only one who thinks that every one of her characters on SNL is the Target Lady in a different outfit.

When your movie revolves around how boring the main characters’ marriage is, you have to be very careful to not bore your audience. Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the makers of Date Night this. The movie has some very funny comedic high points, but for the most part, it just meanders around why Phil and Claire’s marriage is a snooze fest, which causes those scenes to be a bit of a snooze fest.

I can’t hate on Date Night completely. Looking at the graph, you can see that I thought there were some very funny bits in it. And it’s true, the jokes that work really work. There just aren’t enough of them, and one of the jokes that worked, Phil and Claire being given a hard time about taking another couple’s dinner reservation, is beaten to death so badly that I think they rehash it more times in the movie than I saw it seeing the preview a few times. I don’t feel bad about spoiling this joke, since it’s in the preview, but I won’t spoil any of the other parts I found funny, because that will just rob the humor out of them if you see the movie, and Date Night doesn’t have that many funny parts to spare.

Mila Kunis and James Franco are great as the couple whose dinner reservation Phil and Claire steal. In fact, their spot in Date Night’s preview made me want to see the movie. Unfortunately, they’re not in the movie much longer than they are in the preview. I really hate when that happens, when the characters in a preview that convince you to see a movie are barely in the movie and the preview gives away most of the funny parts.

We’re in this blog post longer than we’re in this movie.

Ray Liotta plays a mob boss in Date Night. Don’t make this the reason you see Date Night. If you loved Good Fellas to the point that you want to see him play a gangster again, watch Good Fellas again; you’ll definitely enjoy it more. If you want to see him do comedy, find a theater showing Snowmen; he’s funnier in that.

We saw the movie at Park Slope’s Pavilion movie theater. Avoid this place. Tickets are $12 and the theater does not live up to the ticket price. The seats that aren’t broken smell of a fine mix of mildew and body odor. The theaters are about the size of your living room and the screens aren’t much bigger than a home projector. I remember enjoying this theater in the past; I used to find it charming in the same way I find the Cobble Hill Theater charming. It was definitely one of Brooklyn’s best theaters not too long ago. I don’t know what’s caused it to drop into such a state of disrepair.

After Date Night, Julie mentioned that she thought we saw more good movies in 2008 when we first did this movie a week thing than we are so far this year. I’m hoping this trend reverses soon.

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At The Theater #14: How to Train Your Dragon 3D

While watching How to Train Your Dragon 3D, I couldn’t help but think that the whole movie was a big metaphor for coming out of the closet. Hiccup, the main protagonist, is not like the other Vikings in his town. He’s not a testosterone fueled muscle-head, which pretty much describes every other man here. He’s shunned by his peers for not being athletic, and his father wishes he wasn’t so different.

After a fierce battle with some dragons, dad leads a Viking horde to hunt the dragons on their home turf and sends his son to dragon-killing school, which if you’re still following my metaphor is the equivalent of one of those camps parents on the religious right send their to kids to purge them of their homosexual tendencies. Hetero-camp, um, I mean dragon-hunting school backfires, as Hiccup realizes that he cannot bring himself to kill any dragons and begins to pacify them in ways he learns from training his secretly kept pet dragon.

Hiccup sneaks off to frolic with his pet dragon every chance he gets. He has to do it in utter secrecy though. If the other Vikings found out that he had befriended a dragon, they would scorn him and kill his new friend. Unfortunately, he is found out, his dragon is locked up and dad wishes he never gave Hiccup his helmet fashioned from Hiccup’s mother’s breastplate. Hey daddy Viking, if you’re so ashamed of your son’s gender identity issues, don’t ask him to wear his mom’s bra on his head and call it a helmet. Just sayin’…

In the end, as can be expected in these stories, Hiccup proves to his dad that his skills as a dragon whisperer are worthwhile when Hiccup and his pet dragon save the day. This is the equivalent of the dad finding out that his son might be gay, but damn, the kid can still play football.

I graduated high school with a guy who looked
a lot like America Ferrera’s character Astrid.
Skirt by Hot Topic.
Boots by Ugg.

Don’t agree with that metaphor? How about this one? How to Train Your Dragon 3D is all about the recent financial crisis. Late in the movie, it’s revealed that the dragons aren’t actually evil, they raid the Vikings’ sheep pens not for themselves, but for a big-bad king-dragon that will eat them if they don’t bring it something else. Big-bad king dragon is your too-big-to-fail bank like AIG or Citi. The other dragons are smaller banks that are trying not to be eaten up by the big boys, and the sheep are the taxpayers dollars needed to prevent big-bad from exploding out of his mountain home and wrecking havoc with the sheep and armor markets. The Vikings are the US taxpayers, left footing the sheep bill for big-bad.

Metaphors aside, the oddest thing about How to Train Your Dragon 3D is that despite being the scariest dragon the Vikings have ever encountered, so dreaded that no Viking has ever seen one and lived to tell the tale, the terrifying Night Fury looks like a Digimon that has been upgraded with the cuteness of Puss N’ Boots from Shrek. Since the next dragon down the fright-o-meter ignites itself on fire when attacking you, I was expecting something a little less cute. But the night fury does fly too fast to see while shooting proton torpedoes out of its mouth, so I can see why the Vikings, with their axes and wooden shields, when faced with a dragon sporting the firepower of a the Millenium Falcon, would be on the scared side.

The Night Fury: so deadly, so cuddly.

I cannot begin to explain how happy I am that this movie was good. After a week of some very bad movies back-to-back, I didn’t think I could take another disappointment. That one-two punch of Remember Me and Greenberg did me in. But How to Train Your Dragon 3D definitely gets a thumbs up and a “go see it” recommendation. I would put it up there with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs as an all-ages movie that adults will enjoy.

We saw How to Train Your Dragon 3D at Cobble Hill Cinemas. A word of warning to anyone seeing this, or any 3D movie at Cobble Hill: the usual Tuesday/Thursday discount of $6.50/ticket does not apply. I thought they would tack on $3.50 to the discounted price to cover the 3D glasses and bring the total up to $10, but that wasn’t the case. All 3D movies there are $12, now matter what showtime you see. When you consider that a regular movie will run you $12.50 in Manhattan, and a 3D movie $15-$16, Cobble Hill is still a deal. Plus it’s a great, old school theater. I recommend this theater to everyone…unless you talk during a movie, in which case, have fun at Court Street.

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At The Theater #13: Greenberg

Dear Noah Baumbach,

In your attempt to create a movie that could be described as Garden State for old people, you succeeded in some respects. Unfortunately, you decided to mimic possibly the worst parts of Garden State in Greenberg.

You got a lot of the surface elements right. Ben Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a single guy on a bunch of psych meds who isn’t certain of his place in the world, similar to Zach Braff’s character Andrew Largeman in Garden State. Also like Garden State, he meets a girl who changes the way he looks at and interacts with the world. You included an indie-music heavy soundtrack. You even had Roger stand in front of garish wallpaper in one of the early scenes, but without the matching shirt.
Garden State: like Greenberg for young people…and much better too.

What you failed to capture was any of the charm that made fans of Garden State fall in love with that movie. Before, I could never understand why some of my friends hated Garden State so much. But watching your movie, I now have more of an understanding of their opinion. If the charm of Garden State was lost on a viewer, I think his experience would resemble mine while watching Greenberg.

I find it hard to believe that you could be responsible for one of the best movies I have seen this year, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and one of the worst, Greenberg. The Fantastic Mr. Fox is full of humor and has a great plot, two things lacking in this movie. Some might point out that The Fantastic Mr. Fox was an adaptation, but to I would point out to them that I have enjoyed your original work as well. I thought The Squid and the Whale was a good movie, even though some of my peers labeled it as pretentious crap. I’d point out the great comedic bits, like anything involving Ivan the tennis instructor or eldest son Walt’s lifting of a Pink Floyd song as his own in a school talent contest. But where’s the humor in Greenberg?
If the point of Greenberg was to show just how unglamorous Los Angeles could be, then congratulations, mission accomplished. Also Greenberg succeeded in making me more afraid of being 40 and single and Couples Retreat did of making me afraid of 40 and married. And if it was any way your goal to make a movie that I would like less than Remember Me this year, good try. You weren’t successful on that last one, but I can appreciate attempt.

The blame for me watching and not enjoying your movie does not only fall on your shoulders. I would like to take to task both the Cobble Hill Cinema and the Angelika Film Center for subjecting me to so many multiple viewings of the Greenberg trailer that it seemed almost preordained that I see this movie. Why were they cramming this movie down their audience’s throats?

Sincerely,

Tuesday Night Movies

PS: Garden State had a better soundtrack