Tag Archives: free movie screenings

Moxie at the Movies: The Golden Compass

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On Wednesday night Joe and I went to a free screening of The Golden Compass, a fantasy film based on the novel Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. This film has gotten a lot of buzz, so there was a huge turnout for the screening. I just wish more of the audience had bothered to bathe and use deodorant before heading to the theater, because there were several people near us that smelled like ass.

Now on with the show! The movie is about a stubborn girl named Lyra and her quest to rescue her missing friends, help her explorer uncle Asriel (Daniel Craig), and figure out how to read the Golden Compass, a banned device designed to intuit the truth. Early in the film, Lyra meets Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman), a gorgeous and cunning woman who manages to charm everyone into doing what she wants. Mrs. Coulter is rather dangerous, as Lyra quickly discovers.

The story is set in an alternate reality where souls are represented by animal companions, known as daemons. Lyra’s daemon, like those of other kids, morphs frequently into different animals based on its host’s mental and emotional state. Her daemon, Pan, changes from an ermine to a bobcat to a mouse. I like the idea of our souls being represented by an animal, as it reminds me of my animal medicine cards. The official website for the movie has an interactive feature where you can meet your daemon. I took the test and my daemon is Myron, an ermine. Isn’t he cute? (And yes, that’s my real name on there. Shh! Don’t tell anyone.)

I got a big kick out of the ice (polar) bears, especially the whiskey-loving Iorek Byrnison, voiced by Ian McKellen. They were fierce and feisty, which I appreciate in a bear. I have to admit, though, that I kept waiting for the bears to start guzzling Cokes. I guess this is another example of good marketing campaigns, seeing as I now associate big white bears with a bottle of Coca Cola. Joe and I kept whispering jokes to each other about appropriate moments in the action when the characters could share a Coke and a smile with the ice bears.

There’s been some controversy surrounding this film, with the Catholic League encouraging people to boycott the film. Apparently the novels written by Philip Pullman are more anti-religion, and the League is claiming that this component has been watered down in the movie so that kids will buy the book, read all the atheist stuff, and stop believing in God. Sigh. Didn’t these people learn anything from The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ? Wouldn’t it be more productive for the Catholic League to focus on helping to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and heal the sick, rather than what Hollywood’s doing? Or am I talking crazy again?

I love fantasy films such as The Chronicles of Narnia and anything Harry Potter. The magical elements, the scenery, the British accents (ever notice how all the really good fantasy films usually involve British accents?) – it’s all super fun to watch. For that reason, The Golden Compass did not disappoint me. I’m looking forward to seeing the next two films, and I’ll probably read the books as well.

I did have some issues with the editing, though. I felt as if the director was rushing me through some of the background in order to get to the action scenes. I ended up with a lot of questions, which fortunately the movie’s website answered for me.

All in all, I enjoyed the movie and would recommend it to anyone that loves a good fantasy flick. If your kids are 8 and older, they would probably enjoy this movie, too. Just make sure everyone wears pit stick, okay? Thanks. Grade: B+

Moxie at the Movies: The Invasion

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On Tuesday night I went to a free screening of The Invasion, a sci-fi thriller starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. This film is yet another remake of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was redone in 1978 and 1993 (according to Wikipedia).

Most of the time I am not very open to remakes, even if I haven’t seen the original. I’m just old-school in that way. I was not very pleased when one of my all-time favorite movies, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was being updated for the 21st century. I was even more upset when there was talk of Jim Carrey playing Willy Wonka. But the final product featuring Johnny Depp and Freddy Highmore under Tim Burton’s direction actually pleased me. It was different and yet similar enough to the original without compromising the integrity of either film.

In The Invasion, Washington, D.C. psychiatrist Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) begins to notice strange changes in her ex-husband Tucker (Jeremy Northam), one of her patients (a brilliant cameo by 1978 Invasion star Veronica Cartwright), and everyone else around her. With help from her lab researcher friend Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) and his colleague Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright), Carol discovers that an alien life form has taken over the human race, leaving behind emotionless shells who are hell-bent on assimilation. Carol, Ben, and Stephen must move quickly in order to get Carol’s son Oliver (Jackson Bond) back from her ex-husband before he can infect the child.

Nicole Kidman has made a career of playing women who must overcome major obstacles – governments, major corporations, angry neighbors, and magical forces – in order to survive. It makes sense, then, that she was able to escape from the clutches of the Scientologists. Good job, Nic. Care to lead a deprogramming session?

Oh shit, they have an E-meter! We’ve got to get out of here!

Since I didn’t see the original or the two remakes that precede The Invasion, I can’t speak for any differences or compromised integrity. I can say, however, that I really enjoyed this film. It was suspenseful and the chase scenes were well-crafted. Whenever they showed D.C. landmarks up close, I got a little nostalgic for my hometown. I cheered when they showed an aerial shot of Carol and Ben walking on a sidewalk marked GW - my alma mater.

Some of the technical explanations about the alien virus were rattled off a bit too quickly, making it hard to decipher what was happening. And I would have liked to see a bit more of Veronica Cartwright’s interactions with her formerly abusive husband, instead of Celia Weston doing a terrible Czech accent.

I also got some laughs out of this film, even if that isn’t what the director intended. Two things sent me into giggles. The first was one of the methods of transmission, which involved hocking a loogie into a beverage. It gives whole new meaning to the phrase “don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” The second was seeing all the infected people walking around looking passive and expressionless, and acting extremely courteous and agreeable. As one character tells Carol, “You can fool them: don’t show any emotion, then they can’t tell who’s who.” Apparently all it takes to overthrow the planet is stoicism and excellent table manners. Who would have thought it?

To sum it up, The Invasion is a good film with some decent acting, an engaging plot, and several suspenseful moments. My grade: A-.

Moxie at the Movies: The Bourne Ultimatum

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Tonight Joe and I headed to the theatre to see a free screening of The Bourne Ultimatum, the latest entry in the Jason Bourne series of espionage flicks. For some odd reason I hadn’t seen the first two movies, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy – just never got around to it, I guess. I was a little concerned I wouldn’t be able to follow the story as well as if I had seen the first two films, but it turns out I knew enough of the plot of the first two to figure out what was going on in this one.

Before I delve into the movie, I’d like to mention the security Nazi at the theatre. Mr. Security Dude (S.D.) is a Latino man in his early 50s with a slight accent. When he explains the rules about cell phones and inspection of personal belongings, S.D. tries very hard to be funny. So hard, in fact, that you laugh at his sheer inability to be funny. I have to wonder if the theatre found S.D. at Central Casting and hired him to work the screenings.

Let’s go on with the show. In this final installment of the Jason Bourne films, Bourne (Matt Damon) is once again searching for who he really is. Through contact with a British journalist, Bourne is able to put the pieces together and discover the CIA program that trained him, as well as the conspiracy that created him.

If you are a fan of action films, The Bourne Ultimatum will not disappoint you. The jerky movements of the camera build the tension and the action scenes are long and intense, with excellent pay-offs. Even the scenes in the CIA operations center are intense as the spooks try their damnedest to find and terminate Bourne. Joan Allen is great as Pamela Landy, a conflicted high-level CIA agent who’s been tracking Bourne since the first film. David Strathairn as Noah Vosen, CIA deputy director, is deliciously wicked in his dedication to keep Bourne in the dark about his past with the agency.

I must say that the more I watch Matt Damon, the more I like him. He does a great job playing dark, conflicted, multifaceted characters, such as Edward Wilson in The Good Shepherd and Colin Sullivan in The Departed. Maybe it’s his all-American good looks that trick me into thinking, “Oh, he’s a good guy after all, he’s just misunderstood,” only to see him strangle his lover at the end of The Talented Mr. Ripley, for example. As Jason Bourne, Damon makes me think of James Bond without the tuxedo: a skilled spy with the uncanny ability to escape any perilous situation with only a few scrapes.

The Bourne Ultimatum is, by far, one of the best I’ve seen this summer. I give it an A.

Moxie at the Movies: Transformers

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On Thursday night Joe and I went to a free screening of Transformers. He’d been itching to see this for months, so when someone from my Meetup group e-mailed me a link for free passes, I was all over it.

As I expected would happen, the line for the screening was full of nostalgic men in their 30s and 40s. It would have been a great place to have a singles event: bring in a busload of single ladies and start pairing people off. There were several families and younger kids, though, and these kids were hard-core. I saw one little girl walk up to a guy sitting next to me and punk him out of his gummy bears without saying a single word to him. Her parents did absolutely nothing to stop her, either.

But enough about the moviegoing experience, let’s talk about the movie itself. Transformers depicts the arrival of the Autobots (the good robots) and Decepticons (the bad ones), formerly of the planet Cybertron, on Earth and their subsequent battle for the Allspark, a giant cube that looks suspiciously like the cube that caused so much mayhem in the Hellraiser movies. [I can't get Blogger to post more pics right now, so see this link for a picture of the Allspark, then compare it to the pictures of the Hellraiser cube here.]

We meet young Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), an awkward teen who’s trying to sell his great-great-grandfather’s Arctic exploration memorabilia on eBay. Apparently alien life forms also like finding good deals on eBay, for the Cybertronians find the listing for Grandpa Witwicky’s spectacles and use the information to locate Sam. The beater Camaro that Sam buys with his earnings turns out to be Bumblebee (shown at left), an Autobot that’s been sent to protect Sam. Sam realizes that there’s more than meets the eye [yeah, of course I had to say it] with his bucket o’ bolts when he follows Bumblebee to a local junkyard and catches him in full robot mode, sending a signal to the rest of the Autobot posse. Soon after, 18-wheeler-cum-robot leader Optimus Prime and his crew show up to help snatch the Allspark away from the egomaniacal Decepticons. Meanwhile, the U.S. military is doing battle with various and sundry Decepticons, who are hell-bent on finding the Allspark and taking over the world.

For fans of the 80′s cartoon, all your favorite ‘bots make an appearance: Optimus Prime, Starscream, Frenzy, Ironhide, and Megatron, among others. And while I never saw the original cartoon series, my Internet research suggests that a lot of the storyline is taken directly from it.

This movie starts out very strong, with incredible special effects and good pacing. The lines that are supposed to be funny are actually funny. And then, somewhere in the middle, after the Autobots introduce themselves to Sam, the film transforms into a overwrought, overacted, overdone mess. Suddenly the movie is trying too hard to be a little bit of everything: humorous, romantic, patriotic, suspenseful, and dramatic. At one point, I nearly walked out; later on, during the exhausting fight scenes on the streets of L.A., it was all I could do to not yell “Bullshit!” at the top of my lungs.

I guess this transformation shouldn’t surprise anyone, considering the fact that this is a Michael Bay film. You remember Mr. Bay: he’s the director and producer behind such films as Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, and Pearl Harbor. He’s gotten blasted for making blockbuster action flicks that have extremely contrived subplots, too much melodramatic scoring, and poorly drawn characters. Transformers is definitely not the exception to this rule. For me, Bay’s films are the cinematic equivalent of an insecure, unattractive man driving a tricked-out Hummer: both make me want to yell, “Sorry about your penis!”

Anatomical analogies aside, Transformers is bound to do very, very well at the box office. Even if I’m fed up with the plot points and character arcs, there are millions of young boys – and grown men – who just want to see some robot ass-whupping. And who can blame them? Heck, it’s Transformers! They’re robots in disguise!

My Weekend at the Theatre

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*I’m going to pre-date this post, because Blogger lets me and because I completely intended to write and post this on Monday. And we all know that an ounce of intention is worth a pound of cure. Isn’t that how the saying goes?

This past weekend I spent a lot of time at the theatre. (I usually spell it “theatre” because 1. years of taking French classes got me in the habit of writing it that way, but mainly because of 2. it just looks snazzier.) On Friday night, I saw a free screening of 1408, the new horror flick based on a Stephen King short story. On Saturday, I went to a matinee of Wicked, the musical based on the book by Gregory Maguire. And on Sunday, I saw Ocean’s 13, the heist film based on what George Clooney and his pal Steven Soderbergh cook up.

The screening for 1408 marked the first free screening I went to where I was aware that members of the press were in attendance. I can’t say that I recognized anyone, mainly because I rarely see pictures of film critics. I just assume any reviewer or critic doesn’t publicize their image because they don’t want any crap from people associated with the industry they are reviewing/critiquing. There were people from Dimension Films at the screening as well, and while I’ve been to other screenings where studio employees were present, the vibe at this one was completely different: lots of ego-driven conversations flying around, lots of posturing and sucking-up, lots of pretentiousness. And that was just from me.

As for the movie itself, ehh. I was expecting something a bit more juicy, but it really felt like a rehash of The Shining, with the terror confined to one room. John Cusack plays the cynical, bitter writer who debunks ghostly legends. I always like watching him but it didn’t feel like that much of a stretch for him to play this role. Samuel L. Jackson dialed in his lines as the hotel manager who attempts to persuade the writer to not stay in Room 1408. I expected more ghastly apparitions and homicidal ghoulishness than I got from this movie – and this is coming from a woman that doesn’t really like horror films (aside from vampire flicks). I give 1408 a C+.
Joe’s Review: It was good but not up to the Joe Standard. [I'm not sure what the Joe Standard is, but I'm sure he'll tell me at some point.] Joe’s Grade: C+.


On Saturday I went to the Pantages in Hollywood for a matinee of Wicked. I’d never been to the Pantages before, so this was a great treat for me. When I was growing up in Washington D.C., Momcat and Pops took me to see several musicals: Annie, The King and I, Cats. I would come out of the theatre wanting to sing and dance all the way back to the car. After Saturday’s matinee, I noticed that the feeling hasn’t gone away one bit.

Wicked provides the backstory on Elphaba, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, and Galinda, a.k.a. Glinda the Good Witch of the North. It’s an excellent showcase for female vocalists – Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel originated the roles on Broadway, and they both have amazing voices. In Saturday’s show, Julie Reiber and Megan Hilty played the parts of Elphaba and Galinda, respectively. The story was engaging, the songs were well-sung & cleverly written, and the costumes & sets were great eye-candy. I especially loved the shout-outs to The Wizard of Oz and how the story gives background on the origins of Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, what really brought Dorothy Gale to town, and why everyone wanted those shiny shoes. I give Wicked an A.

[Joe wasn't with me for this one, but he said he wants to go see a musical, as he's never seen one before. Oh, baby, you don't know what you've started...]

On Sunday I went to see Ocean’s 13 with Joe and two women from my Meetup movie group. I love a good heist or con-artist movie, and this time out Mr. Ocean and his crew didn’t disappoint me. The gang pulls a revenge job on casino owner Willy Bank (Al Pacino), who’s screwed over their pal Reuben (Elliot Gould) on a land deal in order to build a new casino, The Bank. It moves a bit fast in the beginning, and I had a hard time keeping up, but in the end it all comes together so beautifully. I give George Clooney a lot of credit for pulling together a great ensemble of actors where everyone seems to get their fair share of screen time. That credit may be undeserved, but dammit, I like him. He’s sexy and looks like he’d be the perfect host for a dinner party, providing great food, wine, and conversation.

Side note: I was thrilled to see Eddie Izzard in the film as con artist Roman Nagel. [Apparently he was also in Ocean's 12, according to IMDB.com. I barely remember that movie, it was so crappy.] When Izzard made his entrance, I was expecting him to act just like the Gypsy con artist Wayne Malloy from “The Riches”, one of my new favorite shows. [Unfortunately, it's ended for the season. But when it comes out on DVD, you must watch it for the great writing & acting.] He was definitely not playing Wayne Malloy, but was still fantastic.

Because of its great cast, engaging plot, and excellent execution, I give Ocean’s 13 an A.

Joe’s Review: He’s asleep at the moment, so I can’t provide his grade. After the movie he said he really enjoyed it, and we proceeded to discuss how to pull off a big heist. We both love the idea of being glamourous con artists on the scale of Danny Ocean. I don’t think that will ever play out – we both talk too damn much to make it work. Joe’s grade: unavailable at this time.

What did you think of these films/shows? What have you seen lately in the theatre, movie or stage? Comment, please!

Three Things That Are Hot Right Now (Well, According to Moxie, Anyway)

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As I work on getting my proverbial shit together and writing a post about something fun and exciting, here’s a list of 3 things you should check out.

Free movie screenings Web sites – Through my Meetup.com friends, I’ve found a number of Web sites that offer passes to free movie screenings in the L.A. area. I’ve gotten to see about 7 movies for free as a result – only 3 of those movies would I have been willing to pay full admission to see, so it was well worth the time to sign up. If you live near a big city, chances are very, very good that these sites will have screenings in your area. Here are a few links:

Knocked Up – I saw this movie at a free screening this past Thursday – great, great film. Well written, well acted, and extremely funny. The theme of relationship management was handled so realistically that I actually forgot I was watching a movie. I will have to see it again to catch the lines I missed because of all the laughing in the theatre. Go see this.
America Jr. – I went to a party on Saturday night and saw several people I hadn’t seen in about 2 years. One of those people was Todd, the writer/co-creator of America Jr. , an online comic strip about a small American town that becomes its own country. Great concept that’s brilliantly executed by the illustrators Brothers Fraim in conjunction with Todd & Nick’s clever writing and storylines. I would not be surprised if we saw this comic turned into a TV show by fall 2008, if not sooner.