Robocop (2014)

2.5 out of 5 stars.

I'm not against a well made remake, and this one has some great bells and whistles, but it ultimately falls short. The original is still as valid and groundbreaking today as it was almost thirty years ago. This one just feels like a slick, and somewhat forgettable, sci-fi movie.

Django Unchained

Tarantino is one of the most contested directors of this time, and he leaves plenty of room for upset with his new film, Django Unchained. Spike Lee, in fact, who admits to not having seen the film, has already lambasted it. To him, and others, I can only say - chill out. I saw this film with a very heavily mixed audience, and the one thing I can say about it is this - We all sat in that theater, for almost three hours mind you, and laughed at the same jokes, jumped in our seats at the same surprises, and cheered for the same good guy(s).

I don't think that Django Unchained, the story of a slave set free by a bounty hunter in exchange for help with capturing some pretty awful people, has an ounce of inflammatory filmmaking in it. It is Tarantino at what he does best - Pulp Fiction (conveniently the title of one of his films). It's funny, it's violent, it's action packed, and in the end, (SPOILER ALERT) the good guy wins.

I had a lot of fun watching this, and everyone else who was there had a lot of fun watching it. It's a great movie. One of my favorites of 2012.

The Spirit

How bad can a movie that is based on a classic comic book series, AND has Scarlett Johansson (the most beautiful woman in the world, as declared by the writer of this blog) in it be? Pretty bad. Frank Miller's big screen adaptation of Will Eisner's The Spirit is a wreck. With a boring plot, a villian so over the top and ridiculous that he's just annoying, and jokes that fall flat EVERY time, The Spirit is a film that should have never seen the light of day. Miller seems to use every filmmaking tidbit he may have learned from Robert Rodriguez during the making of Sin City, but he seems to have forgotten one thing - a great movie is all about a great story.

I don't know enough about The Spirit to be able to say whether or not the story was lifted frame by frame from one of the comics (like Sin City was), but I will say that, if it was, it shouldn't have been. You have to figure one thing - A comic, created in the 1940's, that hasn't been popular in fifty some odd years, might need some sort of update to it to make it meaningful to todays audience. The whole thing was idiotic and I just didn't care about it the whole time I was watching it. In fact, the only two interesting things in the film was Scarlett and Eva Mendes (Sorry ladies, but you don't get much eye candy, unless your a fan of both Gabriel Macht AND Samuel L. Jackson).

Honestly, I would say don't waste your time with this one. Of course, by the time of this writing, I don't think its even in theaters anymore, but don't buy it or even rent it on DVD. If its on TV, then watch it, but don't waste your hard earned cash in any other way on The Spirit.