hoosierrevue

The filmmakers in Rebound diligently stick to the prescribed "kids sports movie" formula, and desperately hope that Martin Lawrence provides a flicker of spunk.

I can't give Rebound more than two stars, not because it was necessarily bad, but because it was painfully predictable. It dares not stray from the tired but true progression of, "a small team of misfits is matched up with a reluctant savior, who inevitably leads the team to victory only after learning a valuable lesson." In this case, the reluctant coach, Roy McCormick, is played by Martin Lawrence, who attempts to single-handedly provide some unique quality to this film in order to distinguish it from all other kid movies. He fails.

Roy McCormick is a hotshot college basketball coach with an outrageous temper and passion for endorsement deals. The audience is repeatedly shown how out of touch with basketball Coach Roy has become by showing many examples of his advertisements, his flashy car, his expensive suits, etc. We are even treated to the routine clips from "The Best Damn Sports Show," where Tom Arnold proclaims that Coach Roy is losing it. After we have firmly established that Roy is in fact out of touch already, we get the inevitable temper tantrum that results in his expulsion from the league. Coach Roy then reluctantly agrees to coach a struggling junior high basketball team. This brilliant plan will supposedly help him rebuild his reputation, thereby allowing him to gain readmittance to the league. Because apparently, the best way to gain credibility as a basketball coach is to instruct reject junior high kids, at which point one will just be rolling in offers from the NBA.

We watch as Coach Roy methodically teaches the kids how to play basketball, one skill at a time, through a series of over-dramatic techniques. He brings in a weird hoodlum preacher who is not funny at all and looks suspiciously like Martin Lawrence dressed up as a hoodlum preacher. He scours the student body for a very tall kid who is also clumsy in a humorous way. He also recruits a large girl to the team, as she is Susie-Likes-to-Fight, and Roy thinks that if things get rough, he can always channel his inner John Chaney and send her out to pummel someone. The audience laughs because she's a girl! Haha, get it—she's a girl! And all the while, goofy and upbeat music plays helpfully in the background, reminding us that this is a stupid kid's movie.

There's the romance factor of course, with Coach Roy trying to get a date with one kid's mom. There's also the slapstick assistant coach (played by SNL cast member Horatio Sanz), who bumbles around hoping to provide supplemental humor when basketballs slip out of his grasp and fly in all directions; there's the overzealous opposing coach who thinks junior high school basketball is as important as college or NBA--but then again, can you really blame the guy? After all, the film has already established that coaching junior high school basketball is a direct path to the big leagues.

Needless to say, this movie is tiresomely predictable, but not necessarily bad. I know that kids will like it, so I would recommend it as a very family-friendly movie. It definitely has the "cute factor," in that sense, but those of us who are not 13 may not see the same value in Rebound.

Sometimes I go to a movie expecting that it will be horribly boring and it surprises me. Other times, I go to a movie expecting it to be good and it is extremely disappointing. This movie, however, turned out to be one of those rare occasions when I anticipated that it was going to be good, I was excited to see it, and amazingly enough it still managed to surprise me by how awesome it was.

Spielberg made an extremely intelligent move by limiting the amount of film that we see in the previews. I had no idea what was going to happen at any given time during the movie, which was refreshing and added to the suspense. I won't do the film an injustice by giving anything away in this review, as I believe that seeing this movie from such an unfamiliar viewpoint allowed me to truly be surprised by what I was seeing.

I was literally on the edge of my seat for nearly the entire duration of the film. The first half hour was beyond suspenseful, and I found myself wide-eyed and mouth open for a solid 20 minutes. The effects in this movie were simply astounding, and for once, not overdone (*cough* George Lucas!). Steven Spielberg was brilliant in his execution of the effects, in that they look real as opposed to being blatantly CGI, and the movie does not depend on them for its visual appeal. The acting was well done, and no matter what your opinion on Tom Cruise, one can't deny that he plays his role in this movie quite well. I wouldn't say that any of the roles were necessarily difficult to play, but if the actors hadn't been so competent in their performances then I don't believe I would have been quite so captivated by the film. Every aspect of War of the Worlds combined to draw me in completely, so that it almost seemed like I was watching some horrific documentary. It's my understanding that the famous radio broadcast of this story in 1938 was mistakenly taken by thousands of listeners as a description of real events, causing widespread panic. What I like about this movie was that it seems as though Spielberg wanted to create the same believability of the story, which is perhaps why the special effects are more subtle and the camera angles taken in many instances from the perspective that a news camera would have. Combined with realistic acting that didn't seem forced but jarringly natural, and the film took on the documentary feel that I mentioned earlier.

As I said, I don't want to ruin anything for you, so I can't give any examples of the things that I found to be most powerful in the movie, but there were several moments when I actually verbalized my astonishment. The actions and details on which Spielberg chooses to focus were stunningly powerful in their subtlety, as it's not hard to imagine them actually happening. The actors strengthen these parts with their reactions to the events surrounding them, behaving exactly as one would expect in times of panic and complete hysteria. The lightening storm at the very beginning of the movie (as seen in the previews), is a perfect example of this, as people cannot help but stand outside and watch despite the obvious danger. Events change quickly from merely strange to absolutely sinister, and the characters are forced to face a very ominous future.

I have never read War of the Worlds, but apparently this movie stays very true to the book and its illustrations, including the ending. This conclusion of the story might bother some viewers in its abruptness, but as they say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." (*cough cough* George Lucas!) I want to see this film in the theater again. I highly, highly recommend that you see War of the Worlds as well, but given the way this movie looks, sounds and feels, I don't suggest that you wait until it comes out on DVD. The first time you see it should be in the theaters, trust me.

Oh yeah, and much as I like most of your movies, M. Night Shyamalan, take notes buddy. Take notes.

It's always encouraging when mindless zombies display more intelligence than regular humans. Sadly, it's also not surprising.

Land of the Dead is not your average predictable zombie movie, in that director/writer George Romero throws in the additional plot component of zombie evolution combined with human stupidity. While he does not explore the intricacies of the physical and chemical zombification process, he does make it clear that one walking corpse in particular, Big Daddy, is one quick-learnin' dead dude. Big Daddy gets an A+ in common sense, whereas many of the humans attempting to escape do not meet the requirements for such a grade. Then again, perhaps that's not fair of me. After all, the zombies do possess some superhuman powers, such as the ability to rip down small, unstable chainlink fences. Humans could not possibly be expected to display such mental and physical capacity, nor should they be expected to later find an escape route through the fortress that is chainlink protection. I mean if these people came up with the brilliant idea that flimsy metal wires criss-crossed into diamond shaped patterns would be more sufficient protection than, I dunno, say…concrete or steel, then it's really not fair to expect any amount of intelligence from them.

The movie takes place some thirty years after Romero's original zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, wherein the dead are brought back to life with a rather unfavorable tendency to eat human flesh. Once a person is bitten by a zombie, he has about an hour before transforming into a zombie himself, at which point it becomes necessary to shoot said person in the head in order to destroy him. Fairly standard so far. However, this movie actually explores a future in which zombies were never fully annihilated, so it portrays a culture that has degenerated into near anarchy, as only a very few cities have managed to survive. Riley (Simon Baker) lives in one of these cities, and commands a militaristic crew of men who periodically raid zombie towns for food and supplies. The kingpin of this last remaining human city, Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), operates a residential complex in the middle of the city called Fiddler's Green, in which only the rich are invited to live. The rest of the people are forced to make do on the streets, living a life of poverty and service to those in Fiddler's Green.

Eventually, the zombies, led by Big Daddy, get fed up with all this raiding nonsense and decide to attack the city. I can hardly blame them—after all, here they are living peaceably amongst each other, and then in come some rootin' tootin' cowboys stealing supplies and shooting up the town. So Big Daddy, Ph.D leads his fellow zombie townsfolk in an attack against the city while the humans stick their fingers up their noses and run around in a necrophobic panic.

I found Land of the Dead to be more than entertaining, and if you like horror movies, zombie movies, scary movies, etc… then you will definitely appreciate this one. The humans are wonderfully idiotic, the zombies refreshingly two-dimensional (versus the standard one dimension), and there are many surprising moments of comedy when the viewer least expects it. There's a healthy amount of gore for those who like that sort of thing—I always cringe during those parts—but it's not overflowing with guts, as the movie really relies on the story and characters for entertainment, with the gory bits being more supplemental. Keep in mind that this is a zombie movie, so I wouldn't recommend it unless you dig that genre. I give it a high rating because I think it is actually a GOOD zombie movie.