A-Team is the greatest movie ever made. Okay, sometimes I get emotional after seeing a truly kickass movie and I have no shame about proclaiming various things the best thing ever, only to have that change upon the next awesome thing I see. However, as of this writing, A-Team is the best thing ever, and I think it has something to do with being based on the greatest show that was ever on TV.

A TV adaptation? Didn’t we have one of those last year?

There’s a common bullshit, poorly conceived opinion that adapting a tv show is a lowbrow indication that Hollywood had run out of ideas. People are excited to appear important by decrying the idea as if they’ve somehow espoused a deep mediation on the state of entertainment by saying the same thing everyone else says. Unless you can really explain how Hollywood has ruined the purity of a cartoon created to sell a toy without laughing then sit down Comicon Q&A denizen. Your argument is predicated upon a fact that doesn’t exist: that all movies without a 2 in the title are super original, Avatar anyone? It’s not an adapation or a sequel, but would it really matter if it had been?

Movies based on a different medium are a GREAT idea! It presents a certain set of challenges to the creators. Does anyone really think because Family Ties was already a TV show that adapting it to a two hour movie with a satisfying three-act structure is easy? The GREAT thing about reboots, origin stories, and adaptations of pop cultural entities is that the audience comes into the movie with a pre-existing list of tropes that they’re excited to see. In Casino Royale, we wait in anticipation to hear “Bond, James Bond”, in Batman Begins, we wait for the cave, the gadgets, the Batmobile, and those two movies know where their audiences want their bread buttered.

When we think of the A-Team we think of pitied fools, crazy Murdock, and Hannibal’s love of plans coming together. It’s all there and more because the writers, Director Joe Carnahan (Narc), and Producers Ridley and Tony Scott (?!?!) have delivered a movie that hones in on an essence of the A-Team that a lot of us may have forgotten. They are an impossible missions team, and the “plans” so haphazardly thrown out in the show’s catchphrase are what the movie zeroes in on as it’s entire concept, the script constantly creates impossible situations that require a masterful plan to get out of, and a montage that includes a blowtorch being lit to put that plan into action. In this way The A-Team is an incredibly successful adaptation. It’s as if the creators saw the thrilling and elaborate Hong Kong kidnap sequence from Batman: Dark Knight and said: “let’s try and pull that off 7 or 8 times.”

On the story level, the film is actually an adaptation of the opening title monologue of the 80′s television show. The team is wrongfully accused of a crime they didn’t commit and they spend the movie trying to clear their name. The actual plot, divorced of these characters and this television property could actually play best on the Who Gives A Shit Channel. There’s a thingy and they have to get it, but somebody else wants to get the thingy, but if that person gets the thingy, then our heroes will lose, and who wants a hero to lose? Not this American, that’s for sure.

Sidenote:  I always admired Ronin because it called out it’s Thingy plot by not even stating what it was. Because who cares? That’s not the point of Ronin, that’s not the point here either.

Aside from nailing the various physical action tropes of The A-Team, the movie also hits all the trademarks of the four 80′s tv icon characters. Hannibal and Face are much more alive than they were in the TV show as the basis of their characters (Mr. In Charge and Mr. Smooth) intersect more with the plot than B.A. and Murdock (Mr. Mean and Mr. Unpredictable) who play support and don’t get much quality interaction, but all four are a dream cast for the big big big childhood A-Team fan that’s writing this. Oh, and Bradley Cooper is probably a legitimate movie star, and Patrick Wilson (Watchmen, Hard Candy), who plays a slimeball intermediary, should be in everything.

The really impressive thing about The A-Team is the action sequences.

In Michael Bay’s The Island, there’s a climactic highway chase where Train Axles and Wheels are thrown off of a truck into oncoming traffic. I remember watching at the time and thinking “oh, okay, so we’ve run out of action sequences.” Because Train Axles are different than everything else that’s been thrown out of a van or off a car hauler into traffic, you see?

I say that because, like you, I thought I’d seen every possible iteration of action sequence since the invention of the genre,  and yet, the plans, and impossible missions, and the constant success of the A-Team at nailing those missions happens in 7 or 8 action sequences that I’ve never seen, including a fantastic action setpiece ending that I won’t ever forget, and probably have to go back and see tomorrow.

If only any of the Mission Impossible movies had been half as entertaining with their impossible missions, or had half the inventiveness of A-Team then…then… well, then I guess I wouldn’t be writing this sentence. But what do you expect, Mission Impossible is an adaptation of a TV show. A TV show that I can only presume is about a lone Agent of an Impossible Missions Force that are all killed in the first episode.

Full disclosure – I have not seen this movie. Everything I am about to write has been gleaned from watching the trailer(s) for this movie, and seeing the bus wrappers on my commute to work.

So, yet once again, we are taken to the land of Far Far Away, and Mike Meyers and Eddie Murphy are still living there. I think the rumor is, Shrek and Donkey hired a group of protesters and lobbyists to get Dreamworks to make a Shrek part 4 to make them relevant again. But I digress. From what I can gather, there’s a wish, a Rumplestilskin, and all his buddies are now his enemies. And Puss in Boots is fat (kind of like what happened to Val Kilmer).

Also, it’s in 3D. You know, like every movie. I think I just saw an ad for “Letters to Juliet” with Amanda Seyfried in 3D. Who’s Amanda Seyfried? Good question – I’ll let you know when I have an answer. So yeah. 3D. Because you can’t get enough flying Donkeys or fire breathing in your face to help punctuate the joke for an additional $11.

Ok, the venom is out. This movie has some real potential, as long as:

• This really is “The Final Chapter”
• They let me know what the title really is
• Eddie Murphy promises to stop acting like Donkey in all of his other movies
• Puss in Boots doesn’t do a “Rocky IV” and get skinny – UNLESS it’s a direct rip of “Rocky IV” with pulling wood in the snow, etc.
• Donkey and the Dragon-lady still have Donkey/Dragon babies (C’mon, cross-species baby-making is funny, and even funnier when you show it to kids)
• Someone closes the book at the end of this movie. And then Mike Meyers wakes up in real life and says, “Whoa – that was a strange dream!”
• In the scene where they are making their battle plan – one of the ogres says, “What does the pepperoni represent?” and then Louis Gossett, Jr. says, “That pepperoni is a pepperoni. It’s my lunch.” and eats it. (Bonus points to anyone who gets THAT reference.)

Not a long list of demands – but I think they are quite simple to fulfill. And let’s hope that this isn’t like “Kung-Fu Panda” – that movie sucked.

Final Review: 3 DonkeyDragon babies breathing fire and speaking Ebonics waaaaaaay up!

Sex and the City 2: Old Sex in Dubai: So, from what I gather in the trailers, the 4 Horsewomen of the Apocalypse are heading to the desert, riding camels, and being all sad they picked the wrong soul mate. You know, the whole thing that drove the first movie? They came back and decided to throw it all back in your face. Besides that, nothing says Hollywood like making the conservative (lightly speaking) Middle East look like a fun place to go for holiday. No, it’s cool, let’s juxtapose the women who represent “female power” and throw them into a society that contradicts that! Yay! Let’s hate the Middle East through the narrow slits of eyeholes these old bags, instead of just hating them like we always do! Yay America!

Also, from what I can see, Sarah Jessica Parker wears a tuxedo, because she is going to a gay wedding (the plot for part 3? the gays adopt!) and what better way to celebrate then everyone wearing a tux….

And I think one of them has kids that she leaves behind in the US while she gets an all expense-paid trip to the gorgeous oil lands. I will like it ONLY if they win it because the dumb one (take your pick) wins it on Jeopardy or the Price is Right.

*sigh*

Final Review: 3 Haliburton Sized Louisiana Gulf Oil Spills Down

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNMmm9xmEmE

• At one point during G.I. Joe, Channing Tatum gets so upset at the loss of a teammate that he puts on a leather jacket, glasses and rides his Harley past the funeral in the rain.
• There is a training montage set to “Bang a Gong (Get It On)”
• Storm Shadow’s first line to Snake-Eyes is “hello Brother.”
• Croc-Master, Mutt, Airtight, and Barbecue do not make an appearances.
• At some point a soldier calls Channing Tatum “a real American hero.”
• The Credits song is “Boom Boom Pow,” because what evokes the feeling of G.I. Joe more than the most recent popular song?

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

So Schadenfriend Paul Preston is starting a site to house all of his movie rants and movie-based content. He asked me if I’d like to write some reviews of the summer movies and I decided to take a shot at my own brand of movie-talk which may not be all that special, but it’s been fun to try. So I wrote a couple that are a little longer than Sandy’s 2 Second movie reviews. Bottom line, they’re very hard to write. Here’s the first entry in my beloved Superhero movie genre.

Is it proper to start a movie review by telling you why you shouldn’t listen to me? I guess if I knew how to write a movie review, I’d know, but; I’m as biased a reviewer as exists when it comes to Superhero movies.

Since the days of Richard Donner’s Superman, and The Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman TV shows, live-action Superhero movies have been the most exciting thing that exists for me. During a thin decade known as the 90′s, I was the guy that showed up opening day for The Phantom or The Rocketeer, which would be the only Superhero movie you’d get for the entire year. I’ve seen Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin more than once, I’ve seen all three Punisher movies, and my review of Ghost Rider was: “I loved every minute of that awful awful movie.”

This might seem a self-indulgent way to begin this review, but let’s not kid ourselves, nobody who meant to go see Grand Torino will feel Wolverine to be an appropriate substitute. If you think you might like a movie about a guy named “Wolverine” who has superpowers and metal claws surgically grafted to his wrists so he can fight crime with a group of other superheroes, then I’m here to tell you, this movie’s for you. Wolverine is as good a movie as it needs to be.

The best Superhero movies are perfectly comfortable living in their own world and offer you a look into it rather than present it to you. Wolverine‘s greatest success is it’s lived-in feel. It makes no apologies for being in the middle of it’s own story as some Superhero movies seem to. Nothing’s more annoying than the license some Superhero movies feel to only speak in plot and explanation – pleading over my agreeable head to the guy behind me who says “yeah right” when he sees someone fly. While being far from the Pulp Fiction of Superhero movies (apparently that’s next summer’s Kick-Ass), the characters in Wolverine act well-used to their world’s rules, and that’s an atmosphere that really sells in any Superhero movie.

Wolverine features a large cast of mutants. Everyone always says that more than one villain ruins a Superhero movie, but I think the whole purpose of Superhero movies is to get as many characters from that universe as you can on the screen. I wish Two-Face, Riddler, Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze were ALL in Batman Returns.

In Wolverine William Stryker, played by Brian Cox in X-Men 2 and some guy who’s really really not Brian Cox in Wolverine, puts together a team of Mutants to do his bidding, such as stealing the metal basis for the Adamantium which later finds it’s way into Wolverine’s skeleton or kidnapping young mutants who’s powers Stryker is combining to create more an more Soldier/Mutant weapons. His team consists of five mutants right there, among them are the kickass Wade Wilson and Agent Zero who’s mutant powers are wielding swords and shooting guns. Well…it’s cooler than it reads. The team is a much grittier bunch of badasses than we’ve seen in the previous X-Men films. On his journey to take out Stryker, Wolverine comes across another another mutant, Gambit, and when Wolverine gets to Stryker’s hideout, there’s like ten more mutants in the basement that he’s kidnapped. This, plus the ongoing story of Wolverine’s relationship with Sabretooth brings us to, like, fifteen more villains than Spider-Man 3 had. This helps Wolverine do a better job of being X-Men 4 than I expected or needed it to.

Okay, here’s four things I like in a movie. Any movie that has these four things – I’m in.
1) Any movie where someone puts together a “special team”, specifically any movie where someone says: “I’m putting together a special team.”
2) When anyone who’s planning revenge against a villain and tells them: “I’m coming to get you.”
3) When a hero agrees to join someone, but only if he gets to do it his way with no law or code of conduct.
4) Any movie where the bad guy types “kill” on a computer screen and then someone or something does exactly what he typed.
Wolverine: Check. Check. Check. Check.

While Wolverine is all that I require of it, my only gripe is that: At it’s heart, Wolverine is a love story. Yes, there is a woman, for whom Logan deforests, she tells him some Native tale of Wolverine’s and then she’s killed (or is she?). While the love story in Wolverine is far from the most incongruous, still, why is this in every movie? I have this theory that somewhere in Hollywood is a single office that all scripts have to go through. And that one guy gives the same note: “Where’s the love story?” Why does Spider-Man, Hulk, Ghost Rider, Iron Man, Superman, Elektra, Daredevil, Transformers, and Batman Any – have to encompass how hard love is? Just encompass how hard flight is, okay? Encompass how hard it is to get a grappling gun to actually catch-and-hold the side of a church while standing on a freeze gun falling down a cliff face. In what world would I walk out of a love-story-less Wolverine and say – “I understand the difficulty of being a government experiment on the run, but who would Wolverine want to screw?” But it pisses him off nice and good and that’s how I like my Wolverine, so be it.

There’s plenty of bad stuff, like a performance as bad as Will.i.am’s stupid name, and a boxing scene that appears to have been from a much earlier draft but somehow made it to premiere night, but somehow Hugh Jackman sells it, as he sells Wolverine constantly, as he has since minute 25 of X-Men 1. What would be harder? Recasting Wolverine after Hugh Jackman or Superman after Christopher Reeve?

Wolverine is lacking all those things I don’t necessarily need in a Superhero movie. Things like…well, just watch X-Men 2 - the basis for the story in Wolverine. For all I love about X-Men 4, it really made me see more clearly what a masterpiece X-Men 2 is. I would put X-Men 2 somewhere close to the top of all Superhero movies, just below Superman: The Movie, and Batman: Dark Knight. Because X-Men 2 finds time to cover the entire plot of Wolverine, while engaging in five other plots and being an engrossing character piece on top of it. Wolverine does none of this, but I didn’t need it to.

Just a scant nine years after Michael J. Fox starred “Teen Wolf,” Jack Nicholson made his own mark on the genre with “Wolf,” a film that probably would have been even more successful if it had been considered the third of the “Teen Wolf” trilogy.

Nicholson plays a mousy book editor who is fortuitously bitten by a werewolf the same week that he is demoted, his position filled by his weaselly metrosexual protege, played by James Spader, who is also sleeping with his wife. 

Now filled with the “passion of the wolf,” Nicholson’s senses are heightened: He can read without his glasses, he can smell the tequila his co-worker drank for breakfast, he can leap shrubs in a single bound, snap the neck of a deer, and drink from its neck like its severed artery is a spigot. He can insult Michelle Pfeiffer straight into bed.

And when James Spader dares to make idle chit-chat with him at the urinal, Nicholson turns his spray on his enemy’s suede shoes. “I’m marking my territory,” he tells the pretty-boy, before cruelling adding to the insult by identifying this batch of urine’s vineyard: “Asparagus.”

If “Teen Wolf” is the puberty allegory of this trilogy, “Wolf,” it seems, is the Viagra metaphor.

Life is simply too short for the hour-long drama. With the exception of Burn Notice and a peppering of Battlestar I don’t do hour-long-drama. I should be the biggest fan of Heroes, but everytime I try to watch that show it seems to be about Sylar sitting in a living room for an hour and a guy in ancient China thinking out loud. Heroes would be better if it had Adam West in spandex.

I wouldn’t even think about adding a second hour-long drama to my Netflix queue if I hadn’t heard over-and-over times 10 to the 23rd how great The Wire and Lost are. So I put them up against each other.

I rented both first discs and The Wire is winning 4-1. I’m at episode 4 of The Wire and halfway through the first episode of Lost, which I’ll admit, is pretty damn good, but The Wire is holding court. I have to wait for the next disc for The Wire to arrive, which’ll give Lost an episode or two to come back. But, will The Wire disc 2 sit there until I finish Lost disc 1, or will I go back to The Wire as soon as disc 2 arrives. That’ll be the clearest indicator of who might win this match. I’ll keep you posted.

Movie: WALL-E
Starring: A bunch of robots all drawn with computers. And the voice of the Mac when you tell it to speak something.

Just saw WALL-E on On Demand and just absolutely loved it. Who knew you could tell such a great story through animation and such little dialogue. It’s a great metaphor about all of our trash — I’ve always wondered where all of your old pillows and shoes go. Plus — nice commentary on how fat everyone’s getting. 700 years into the future and nobody can walk because they’re all too fat. I liked Fred Willard as the President, and would like to approach the production team for an insight in their decision to use a practical image of Fred Willard over a graphics-Pixar version. I like it though. Lots of laughs, Jeff Garlin’s great as the captain and if you look closely, you’ll catch some sly references to 2001. Stay through the credits — they’re pretty clever and make you wonder why more movies don’t spend some time on some kick ass credit sequences.

On a terrible Sunday afternoon, after a morning of working – it’s important to pick the “right place” to refuel. Since we are working in the River North area, the choices of places to eat are great! There’s Planet Hollywood Gino’s East, Hooters, Some Sushi/Deli, Ed Debevic’s… Too many too mention. Today, we decided, Ed Debevic’s. Why? Well, half of us had never been there, and the other half couldn’t remember what the experience was like. I think we can sum this up in 2 seconds:

Don’t Go.

It’s not that we mind that the wait staff is fake rude to us – heck, it’s fun enough to “play along” with them. The problem is that the food is “real” shitty. It’s $10 for anything. Want a side of fries? $10. Want a burger that was just thawed 30seconds ago? $10. Want some chicken tenders from McDonald’s across the street? $10.

To add insult to injury – for about 5 minutes every hour our waitstaff decides to stand on tables and counters and dance. And the last thing we need is our overweight 50s house mom yelling at me to clap harder while she does the chicken dance.

And the food? Don’t ask.

Overall – two overwhelmingly huge thumbs down. Is it possible to delete restaurants from Google Maps? And Yelp? Does anyone use Yelp? Oh – and if we hear that anyone, ANYONE, suggest to a visiting relative/friend:

You should totally go to Ed Debevic’s

We will hunt you down like the rabid rat you are.