Your Highness Review

Rating: 1/5

Danny Mcbride is one of my favorite comedic actors. His way of getting laughs just really hits me in the funny bone. On whether it is on Eastbound and Down or in Pineapple Express, the man steals every scene he's in. Even when paired with people like Seth Rogen, he's amazing. Too bad his monumental talent is completely wasted in Your Highness.

Thaddeus (Danny Mcbride) is the younger brother of the great hero Fabious (James Franco). Where Fabious is a stoic, strong, and mighty hero, Thaddeus is always pushed to the side and doesn't have much self esteem. When Fabious' bride to be (Zooey Deschanel) is kidnapped by Lazar (Justin Theroux), the two brothers must embark on an epic journey to save her.

What follows is a series of gross and unfunny scenes the likes of which I haven't seen since Epic Movie. Every single joke falls flat, and the actors look embarrassed to speak the dialogue. I get that it's poking fun at Krull and the Beastmaster movies, but it doesn't work. Like Green Hornet, the movie centers around one joke: Danny Mcbride is in a fantasy world.

As a result, the terrible, TERRIBLE script written by Theroux stays completely tethered to that one joke, and the actors are given nothing to work with. Instead of being the Danny Mcbride or the James Franco we know and love, the leads end up being dumb archetypes and their signature humor can't shine through.

Your Highness is more of a tragedy than a comedy. It had so much promise to be one of the funniest movies of 2011, but the filmmakers ended up making a forgettable stupid action-comedy. I don't think that this will be too much of a blemish on the actors' resumes but it was disappointing nonetheless. The only people I can see liking Your Highness are 13-year-old boys who love penis jokes. Now, I'm going to re-watch Eastbound and Down so I don't lose hope.

Insidious Review

Rating: 4/5

When it comes to horror nowadays, it's usually bad. Horror films are always either remakes or sequels, and the rare original ones rely way too much on jump scares. For me, there is a huge difference between a surprising movie and a scary movie. For example, The Unborn is surprising, and Insidious is scary.

Renee and Josh (Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson) have just moved into their new house with their three children. Things are off to a bad start when their oldest son, Dalton, falls into a coma. Three months later, Dalton is still unconscious, and scary stuff starts happening. The family tries to move away, but they start to think that the house isn't the problem.

As I said, what most horror movies are missing completely nowadays is atmosphere. When scares happen in films like Darkness Falls, all that happens is a loud noise and something pops out. In movies like The Ring, there's a buildup of a feeling of absolute dread. The feeling is necessary to have so that people are scared of what might happen rather than what they know will happen.

Insidious accomplishes this magnificently with dark scenery, great sound design, and the fact that we don't see the scary stuff for most of the movie. As a result, when the ghosts and demons haunting the main characters show up, we're more scared than if they just dragged people into the darkness every three seconds. Of course, there are silly scenes, especially once the psychic comes into the plot, but most of it works very well. Of course, without good acting it's all for naught, and all the leads do their job well.

Insidious does the job of proving that the Saw guys weren't only good at gore effects. This movie proves that they can sculpt real terror in their audience, and do it well. Next time you want to be scared, go see Insidious. It's a lot of fun.

Source Code Review

Rating: 4/5


Science fiction is a genre that is really hard to pull of well. Not only do sci-fi writers have to come up with a good story, but they have to come up with a story that has some sort of crazy science to it that makes it unique. Time travel is usually a good place to start, but the story won't work unless there's a creative spin on it. Then, you need to make it plausible, so that it's not too fictional. Good thing Source Code does this stuff.

Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up and finds himself in the body of a complete strangers, surrounded by strangers, and on a train. The woman in front of him (Michelle Monaghan) somehow knows him, and after eight minutes, the train explodes. Stevens then wakes up in a strange capsule, where he is told by Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) that the army is making Stevens relive the last eight minutes of one of the victims of a train bombing, so that he can find the bomber and prevent further attacks.

Ok, the "science" in this movie is absurd. Assassin's Creed level absurd. There is no way that anybody could ever relive and control the experiences of someone who was burned up in an explosion. And yet, the movie is smart enough and well written enough that I just went along with it. Even though the ending is a stretch and quite hokey, I could still buy the whole "genetic memory" thing. This of course is helped by the great performances. Gyllenhaal, Farmiga, Monaghan, and Jeffrey Wright (a brilliant actor who plays the creator of the machine) are all great. The characters are well developed, which really adds to the atmosphere of the film.

Because Captain Stevens gets to know the characters in the simulation, we do as well, and each moment waiting for the explosion we know is coming is tough. The editing is also of note. Source Code never stops moving, and it's really really cool how Duncan Jones and his team put it all together. Overall, Source Code isn't groundbreaking, but it's good. I recommend it.