Now You See Me

I'm always up for a good movie that makes you think and has cool effects and out of the ordinary things. I went into this movie expecting all those things, and it only partly delivered. My girlfriend and I were pretty excited about this one, but we didn't really know what to expect. All we knew was that it was about magicians, and they were doing some pretty cool stuff. It tends to happen a lot, when you see a movie trailer and it looks fantastic, but it turns out that all the cool and fun parts were all in the trailer, and not much else happens in the movie.

Don't get me wrong, it was definitely an enjoyable film. The group of magicians called themselves The Four Horseman. Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, and Dave Franco are these four magicians. One thing that caught my eye was that Jesse Eisenberg was a very smart and intelligent talker, like we saw in "The Social Network." He is able to talk very quickly and just silence everyone around him. That is one of the only things that I can really remember enjoying in the movie. Woody Harrelson's character was pretty comedic, but he seems to always be like that.

This movie just seemed to go downhill for me. It started out on a high level, getting us to know the characters and their different unique abilities, and then seeing what they are capable as they all join together and form The Four Horseman. As seen in the previews, they rob a bank which is across the world. Something like that is pretty crazy sounding, and would make anybody interested in seeing how that is done. The movie was full of twists and was meant to make you guess what would happen next, but for me, I wasn't really shocked or surprised by anything. I feel like I could have written this movie myself. The ending seemed too obvious, and as we got further into the movie, not much seemed to be happening. There wasn't any cool magic tricks or anything. It just seemed to wrap itself up pretty quick and call it good.

Not really one I need to see again, but I think if someone is more into magic and maybe even supernatural kind of things, it would be enjoyed a little more.

Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino has done it again. The crazy filmmaker has managed to get all of the categories for a movie, (Action, Violence, Language, Crude Humor and Remarks, Comedy, Drama) everything into this movie. But, that seems to be how all of his movies are.
This is a western type movie, that has a lot to do with slavery. Blacks are sold and purchased to whites for whatever the whites may want. Leonardo Dicaprio is a wealthy slave trader type person. He is first introduced in the film with 2 black men fighting each other very brutally. The movie uses the word Nigger a million times. The movie can be very uncomfortable to watch.
Jamie Foxx is our main character. I wouldn't really call him a hero, seeing as how the movie is very brutal and doesn't really have good things to say about white people or black people. But, he is a slave and ends up being purchased  by Christoph Waltz's character, who is a bounty hunter. He buys Foxx to help track down 3 men. It is later discovered that Dicaprio has Foxx's wife and she is being mistreated. So Foxx uses his new bounty hunter and fighting skills to go and save her.
So, it is good to see some of the slavery being handled and stopped in the film, but the whole movie is rough, and they really overdid it on, well, everything, but mainly the violence. People would be shot in the leg and it would explode. People would get shot in the head, and there would be a fountain of blood.
All in all, maybe worth a watch once, but I personally don't need to see it again.

World War Z

I have seen many zombie movies in my time, yes I am talking like I am old and have had a long life of zombie watching. But now-a-days, zombies are very big in the entertainment industry, along with vampires and other monsters. It seems like there is always something going on with zombies somewhere. All these movies that are about the undead always have different ways of portraying them, whether it is a scary, gruesome thriller like "Dawn of the Dead," or a comedic love story with still the regular attributes of a zombie, like "Warm Bodies." World War Z is one of the best movies about the undead I have ever seen. I loved everything about it, from the cast to every piece of the storyline. They cause stress and fright while watching them, but movies that make you involved and make you wonder what life would be like if something like what the movie is showing was going on in real life are very entertaining to watch, for me anyway.
So, I didn't know anything about this story when I saw the first trailer for it, or even when I actually went to the movie. It is originally a novel by Max Brooks. I don't know how well the movie matched the book or anything, but I guess that's okay because I am not reviewing a book am I?
So back to the movie, in my opinion, this film has portrayed zombies in the best way possible. Yes, all movies about zombies do a pretty good job, and do a lot of the same things- walking slowly kind of hunched over, limping, moaning, and when they catch a scent or a glimpse of someone who is not dead, they snap and do whatever they can to catch that person and....eat them. It is always the same, but World War Z puts a little more into it. When we first see a zombie attack, Brad Pitt, who is the main character, watches as the poor man changes into one himself. Pitt counts 12 seconds from the time being bitten to becoming one of the undead. I have never seen it happen that fast, and I think that is good, the disease is something that seems to be taking over the world and it is very serious and seems to be happening very fast, so I think the change from human to zombie should be farely quick. Another thing is- in other movies, we don't get to see a lot of when zombie attacks first start happening. When the movie starts, we are put right into the middle of the zombie apocalypse. World War Z, like all the rest, doesn't show a place of origin or when things started happening, but it does show zombies attacking what looks like a brand new area for them, and we see huge swarms of them running through the cities and attacking as they go, and it looks they just do that and movie across the globe, which I thought was creepy and cool to see.

I don't want to talk to much about it, but one last thing, which you can get from just watching the trailer. These zombies are being shown climbing each other, making towers with their bodies, and reaching humans no matter where they are. There is a giant wall that you would think nobody could ever reach over, but these zombies get so determined that they are running up each other and scaling hundreds of feet in the air. And when there are thousands of them, it just keeps going and there really isn't any stopping them.
The zombies make creepy noises that we haven't really ever heard, and the movie shows different kinds of dangers of being in a world where there are millions of dead people walking around trying to eat you.
Definitely worth a watch, or maybe see it twice. I'm ready to see it twice, I enjoyed every minute of it. The story was absolutely perfect, very well written. Everything clicked and nothing was left out. Brad Pitt did fantastic and deserves to be recognized for this film, and he is.