Patti O'Shea

Over the weekend, I got a little bored. Since I was still recovering from the virus, I wasn’t good for too much yet and headed over to On Demand to see what free movies were playing. After paging through all the options, I chose to watch 13 Going On 30 and I’m so glad I did.

This movie came out in 2004, so there will be spoilers. You’ve been warned.

Jenna Rink is 13 and wants to be one of the popular girls. Her best friend, Matt who’s always photographing something, doesn’t understand why she wants this. And because they pick on him, who can blame him?

On the evening of her birthday party, he brings over a gift for Jenna. He built her a dream house and filled it with things for her. Then he opens up the wishing dust and sprinkles it over the top of the house. Then the popular kids show up, and once the leader Lucy who’s called Tom Tom gets the paper she conned Jenna into writing for her, she prepares to play a nasty trick on her. She ties a blindfold around Jenna’s eyes and sends her into a closet, telling her that one of the popular boys wants to join her. That, of course, isn’t what happens. Devastated, Jenna wishes she were thirty and some wishing dust from the dream house falls on her.

The next thing Jenna knows, she’s waking up in a strange bedroom that’s inside a strange apartment and she’s 30. As she’s trying to come to terms with all this, a man (grown-up Jenna’s boyfriend that transplanted Jenna knows nothing about) comes out in only a towel. When he drops it, she flees and waiting for her in front of her Manhattan apartment building is her coworker, Lucy, with the limo to take them to work. Jenna, it turns out, is a high-powered magazine editor.

Jenna calls her parents and finds out they’re on a Caribbean cruise, so as soon as she can, she finds her best friend, Matt, looking for some help. Matt has turned into a prince, but she soon learns they aren’t friends anymore and haven’t been since her 13th birthday party when she threw the dream house at him.

That’s only the first of many revelations teenage Jenna learns about the woman she’s become. There’s a whole bunch of not very nice stuff including stealing people’s ideas at work and then firing them, sleeping with married men, and sabotaging her magazine to help a competitor sell more copies. You see, if they reach 1 million in circulation, Jenna will be editor-in-chief of the competing magazine.

I honestly didn’t expect much from this movie. I figured it would just be some average teen flick, but boy was I surprised. I loved 13 Going On 30 and I am hugely picky about movies.

Grown up Jenna is played by Jennifer Garner who did a great job acting like a 13-year-old trying to act like she’s 30. As the story progresses, she loses some of her naivete, but not her innocence. She’s disappointed by who she’s become and doesn’t want to be that person. And when she seems on top of the world, as if she can be this genuine Jenna and still succeed, the bottom falls out.

This film had heart. Thirteen-year-old Jenna is very easy to relate to. Who didn’t want to be popular when they were that age? But it was once she fast forwarded to 30 that things became more interesting. Thankfully the script didn’t spend a whole lot of time with Jenna foundering around. Yes, at first things aren’t easy, but she adapts. Maybe a little too quickly to be believed, but I was happy to overlook that since I’m not a huge fan of characters that don’t smarten up. Jenna did and she stepped into her adult life…well, if not spectacularly, at least honestly and ably.

Along the way, as Jenna learns who she’s become and is disillusioned by it, she grows up in ways that aren’t physical. She reconciles with her parents, who she’s kind of blown off. Jenna spends Christmas in St. Bart’s with friends, not home with her parents. She realizes what she gave up when she lost Matt as a friend, and when she tells him how she feels, well, he tells her life has moved on and he’s marrying his fiancee. I liked this, too. It would have been too easy for the writers to have him dump the fiancee and give them a happy ending, but that wasn’t our payoff.

As you’d expect, Jenna gets sent back to the night of her 13th birthday, and this time, she kisses Matt instead of throwing the dream house at him. And her entire life gets rewritten.

My favorite scene in the movie is the one where Jenna dances to Thriller at the swanky magazine party and so many people join in. There were other great scenes, too, of course, but this is the one I want to watch again and again. I also loved grown up Jenna singing Love is a Battlefield with a bunch of 13 year olds during a slumber party.

The biggest disappointment for me? When Jenna returns, we go from kiss with Matt to grown up Jenna and Matt on a completely different life path than what they’d had before. I would have liked to have seen some more of these differences that Jenna made the second time around. Like did she become a magazine editor again? Did she and Matt date all the while between 13 and 30 the second go around or not? I really missed having a bit more epilogue to the ending.

But despite my disappointment in not getting more information, the ending was still near perfect for the movie. It was a very satisfying conclusion.

As you can guess, I’m giving this film two thumbs up. I highly recommend.

There might be spoilers ahead. I’m going to try to avoid them, but if you don’t want to risk it, please stop reading here.

Let me preface this review my mentioning that I’d never had any desire to watch Cowboys and Aliens. One of the guys at work loaned his DVD to me because I was talking to him when another person he’d loaned it to came over to return it. I also was doing other stuff while the movie was on, so I wasn’t paying strict attention.

Cowboys and Aliens is basically that aliens have come to Earth to take our gold. For reasons that are unclear to me, they attack a town and abduct some of the townspeople. A group from the town goes to rescue those who were taken.

The first thing that surprised me was this movie was set in the old west. I didn’t realize it was historically set, which echoes back to it not being a movie I’d wanted to see so I didn’t pay attention to details while it was advertised. I imagined modern day cowboys and I had to adjust my expectations.

Secondly, the movie started out slowly. Oh, there was some intrigue about what the heck was going on with Daniel Craig’s character that kept me watching, but there was too much stuff I found boring. Like the spoiled rich man’s son who could do anything he wanted in town because of his daddy (played by Harrison Ford). I’m not sure why this spoiled man-child needed that much film space spent on him, but they spent a lot of the opening on him and I got bored.

Finally, the aliens attacked the town and stuff started happening. I perked up briefly, but it didn’t last. The cowboys ride out to find the aliens seemed to take a very long time. We got to hear Harrison Ford’s character tell a story about how he got to be such a bad tempered SOB. During this trip we also discover a “shocking” revelation about one of the posse members and we get more telling. This time about the aliens and why they’re here.

The dramatic battle at the end? Not so dramatic. I found it to be slow and lacking much in the way of suspense.

Maybe if the premise had grabbed me enough to want to see the movie, I wouldn’t have been so bored watching it. Or maybe not. I’m very picky about movies and a story has to grab me to turn off this inner critic. This film couldn’t do that. The best part was watching Daniel Craig who did look fine.

If you have nothing else to do, there are worse movies to watch. There are better, too, but someone else might enjoy it.

My rating: 2 stars

Bridesmaids stars Kristen Wiig as Annie Walker. The story is about a woman who is maid of honor for her best friend’s wedding and ends up in a competition with another bridesmaid.

Annie is one messed up woman. She’s working as a clerk in a jewelry store, a job she’s bad at and has no interest in. She’s sharing an apartment with a British brother and sister. She lets some guy regularly use her for sex and feels crummy about it afterward. (He calls her his number 3 f**k buddy.) She drives a crummy car and her taillights are out.

But things really start to go downhill for her when her best friend gets engaged and asks her to be her maid of honor. The friend also asks a group of other women to be bridesmaids, including a rich woman whose relationship with the bride makes Annie feel threatened. What follows next is a series of events where the two women try to outdo each other.

The movie was supposed to be a comedy and I’d heard good things about it, but I didn’t think most of it was funny at all. I found Annie to be Too Stupid To Live for most of the movie and feel she brought most of her problems on herself. She acts like a complete idiot throughout the entire movie, and when she flips out at the shower–screaming at others, breaking a giant cookie and having it fall on top of her, taking her to the ground, getting messy in the chocolate fountain–the bride kicks her out of the wedding. I don’t blame her.

Annie also meets this really great guy during the course of the movie and after sleeping with him, acts like a complete idiot, hurts him, and alienates him as well.

Annie wasn’t the only idiot, though; all the bridesmaids acted bizarrely. More than one time while I watched the movie, I’d mutter who acts like this?

There were a few moments that kept me watching, but in all honesty they were few and far between. At the end, when Annie finally smartened up, things improved greatly, but the movie was already pretty much a loss for me by then.

Not recommended.

Source Code stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Captain Colter Stevens. The movie opens with him waking up on a train. He doesn’t know how he got there because the last thing he remembers is flying a helicopter in Afghanistan. The woman across from him is talking to him as if she knows him, and when he goes to the bathroom and looks in the mirror, the face he sees isn’t his. Then the train blows up and he’s back in a capsule and another military officer is talking to him over a video link.

It turns out that he’s part of a mission to identify the man who blew up the train. The team can transport him back 8 minutes into the life of another man who was actually on that train. And they do it over and over again because Stevens can’t get enough information. Each time he goes back, the captain tries a new tactic. Each time he goes back, he’s more assured in his role, but there are things he doesn’t know.

I’m keeping the description of the movie vague because I don’t want to reveal any spoilers and ruin the movie for anyone.

I hadn’t heard of Source Code and I’m surprised I missed picking up something about it because it’s exactly the kind of movie I enjoy most—action, adventure, and suspense with the slightest touch of romance. I would have liked a bit more on the romance front, but given the setup for the plot, I don’t think it was possible and it was good the way it was.

Anyway, because I hadn’t heard anything more about the movie than the brief description on the On Demand screen, I got to be surprised by the turns the storyline took. Nothing was a gasp-out-loud shock, but I definitely didn’t see everything coming and I love that.

Gyllenhaal did a great job making his character sympathetic and likable from the start. I felt his confusion and I was embarrassed for him as he acted strangely, drawing attention to himself in a what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-him way. I was on the journey of discovery with him throughout the movie and there are two storylines twined together. There’s Stevens trying to discover who bombed the train and there’s Stevens trying to figure out how he got pulled into this mission for Project Source Code. Both stories carried plenty of suspense and kept me intrigued throughout.

The only negative comment I can sort of make is that I guessed the identity of the bomber early. However, the film did a great job of throwing me off the track and I decided I was wrong and started looking for other suspects. So while the guilty party wasn’t a shock, it was sort of a surprise because I’d already dismissed my suspicions. I hope this was vague enough.

Since I don’t have a bunch of minuses to list here, you’ve probably guessed I’m giving the movie a recommendation. You’re right.

Very enjoyable. Recommended.

 I’m going to do my best not to give away any spoilers since this hasn’t been available on disk for long. I was lucky enough to get some coupons to watch On Demand movies, so I took advantage of one of them to watch Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides, the fourth in the franchise. Basically, Jack is off to find the Fountain of Youth, but there are two other groups involved in addition to the one he’s working with. That’s the gist of the plot, but of course, there is plenty of other stuff going on throughout the 2+ hours.

I loved the first POC movie. I thought it did a fabulous job with the characters and the story was enough to make them shine. I was bitterly disappointed with the second movie, and while I thought the third was a bit better, I didn’t like it. I had a number of issues with it, including the fact that the core of the characters were sacrificed for plot expediency. And there was more special effects than the important stuff that made the first movie so special.

With this in mind, I went into On Stranger Tides with some trepidation. Overall, I liked it well enough. It wasn’t as awesome as the original, but it was much better than the last two.

Johnny Depp is gorgeous and I love him as Captain Jack Sparrow. Will and Elizabeth from the first three movies aren’t in this one, and I didn’t miss them. I liked them, but I felt as if their story had been played out in the first three movies. It made a lot of sense to drop their characters and move forward with the pirates. I’m actually surprised Hollywood did it since it’s just the slightest bit risky. I actually think, if they continue to make POC movies, that it would be smart to do arcs and drop those characters out as each arc finished, with the core players moving forward. Like Johnny Depp.

Um, but I digressed. This is the kind of thing I do when I watch movies–analyze them like this.
Anyway, this time around, the movie is about more than special effects and that’s part of what made it better than 2 and 3. But there still was less emphasis on character and character interaction in Stranger Tides than in the Black Pearl. I’m all about the characters. But there were some good moments. Jack Sparrow’s wild escape scenes are pure fun and the first one in this movie had some particularly good moments. Actually, all the escape scenes were fun and played to the other movies and how Jack was portrayed.

Keith Richards was awesome as Jack’s father. He only had a few lines and it wasn’t as if they were earth shaking, but knowing that Depp based Jack Sparrow–in part–on Richards and then seeing Richards playing the character’s father? It’s too big a kick not to enjoy. A little like an Easter egg.

There were a few interesting things they did–like making the mermaids be vampires. Okay, I’m not sure the mermaids were supposed to really be vampires, but when they bared their fangs, that’s what they looked like to me and so that’s where my mind went. And I also found what they did with the ships and the bottles to be intriguing as well.

While there were a few funny moments, I found this one lacked the humor of the original and I missed that. Plenty of action and adventure, though, and lots of Johnny Depp, who is really the best thing ever about POC and the reason why I was willing to take a chance on POC4 after the debacles that were 2 and 3. And there’s a character listed in IMDB as the Spaniard who was pretty good looking in the movie. The actor is Oscar Jaenada.

Overall, I give it a qualified recommendation. It wasn’t great, but it was enjoyable enough.

When Battle Los Angeles first came out, I was tempted by the television ads to watch it in the theater. I’m just not much for going out to movies. Not only is it expensive, but I’m so picky about storyline, that I have a hard time with a lot of films. Recently, however, the movie came out on DVD/Pay Per View and I was seeing all those ads again that made me think I really want to see this. There were some mediocre reviews and I hesitated, but I finally decided to stream it on Friday night.

The storyline is pretty simple. Aliens invade Earth and are technologically superior to us. (Of course they are. They traveled light years through space to get here and we’ve gone to our moon.) They’re here to wipe out all sentient life on our planet in order to take our resources. An expert on one of the inserted news clips in the movie says it’s a standard ploy to eradicate life on the planet you want to strip. I’m not too sure about that, but it doesn’t matter. Later, in another pseudo news clip, we hear that they’ve come for our water and that our planet is the only one in our solar system that has it on the surface.

Okay, alien invasion with multiple mother ships filled with flying drones and armored alien warriors inserting near large population centers around the world. Our hero is Staff Sergeant Nantz of the US Marines. He’s served in the Middle East and is the only survivor of his squad. He feels responsible for the deaths of the other men and is dealing with some issues. He’s assigned to a new unit under a brand new lieutenant. He’s informed by other men in his unit not to trust Nantz.

It turns out the military is in over their heads against the superior forces and technology of the aliens. Our group of US Marines immediately takes losses. As they try to reach a central point to regroup, they pick up some civilians hiding in the police station and soldiers from other branches of the service, including a US Air Force sergeant who ends up playing a significant role as the story goes on.

I love action/adventure movies where there’s a lot of suspense and tension. This one certainly fit that category. The tension starts early and it just intensifies throughout the entire film. There was pretty much no downtime from the suspense. Even when the group found somewhere that seemed secure to treat their wounded, we knew it wouldn’t last long. Those aliens could find them wherever they were. TBH, the unrelenting tension almost became too much. I would have liked a breather now and then and I just didn’t get one.

There was no romance of any sort in this movie, which you maybe guessed since I said there was no downtime from the suspense. I thought there might be one brewing between Nantz and one of the civilians, but if the writers planned to use that, it was dropped. I’m not sure they could have squeezed it in with everything else that was going on, but I did miss it.

There were a couple of things I thought were plot holes. For example, the aliens are here for our water, yet their ships and other modes of transportation run on water. My thought was that if a resource was scarce, wouldn’t they create ships that ran on some other fuel? Now that we’ve dealt with the high-cost of oil on Earth, I keep reading about biofuels. We’re looking for alternative sources, so it seemed to me the aliens would have done this as well. It’s much more cost effective to create a new source of power than to travel light years and invade another planet.

But this was a minor quibble–all the plot issues I had were minor–and didn’t subtract from my enjoyment of the film. This isn’t meant to be taken a serious movie, IMO; it’s meant to be pure entertainment/fun. And I was happy to go right along with this and not nitpick as I watched.

Some of the movie left me thinking of Independence Day–how the alien invasion was staged, how we were overwhelmed and beaten, how a small group of men make a difference, the general look of the aliens and their ships–to name a few. It’s hard to compare the two movies, though, despite this because Battle Los Angeles wasn’t trying for any of the humor that filled Independence Day. This movie also didn’t focus on more than one storyline. Everything revolves around this single group of marines.

Battle Los Angeles also gave me a few moments where I teared up and I’m not a crybaby when it comes to entertainment–not movies or books. While ID tried for a few emotional moments, I never got felt them while I watched that movie. I think maybe this could be attributable to the focus put on the hero, SSgt Nantz and some of the others on the team. I really grew to like Nantz and Lieutenant Martinez and the USAF sergeant–the only military woman in the film.

A quick comment about our lone military woman, Sgt. Elena Santos. (Yes, I had to pop over to IMDB and look that name up.) I really liked her role in this movie. She might have been shot down and lost the rest of her team, but she’s nobody’s pushover. She fights beside the marines with as much fervor as they do and she is instrumental throughout Battle LA. I don’t want to give any spoilers away, but nothing good happens without her. I hope that’s vague enough. Also, the other female character, the one I thought might have a relationship brewing with Nantz, was also strong. She’s a veterinarian and she’s the one who helps them learn how to kill the aliens. She also doesn’t act like a victim and given how Hollywood tends to portray women in general, I was happy that this film avoided making the women weak.

I also liked the ending of the movie. A lot. I won’t say more because of spoilers, but it left me feeling good.

If you’re looking for a couple of hours of mindless, fun-filled suspense, I can recommend Battle Los Angeles. It’s not going to be nominated for an Oscar, that’s a given, but it was an enjoyable way to spend the evening and I give it a thumbs up.