cowboys and aliens

You know what I realized after seeing this movie? I am ridiculously easy to please. I often scoff at my friends for thinking that movie A is worse or better than movie B, and yes, I know that's arrogant, but I guess I really am just easy to please when it comes to movies. I criticize them a lot, sure, but when it comes to these summer flicks, they don't have to be particularly deep. Yes, I had a lot of negative things to say about Green Lantern for example, but that movie failed on every level, even being just a simple popcorn movie. Hell, the popcorn made my stomach hurt when I saw that movie, so it even failed at THAT.

But, Cowboys and Aliens. I have mentioned several times not only in this blog but in real life that Harrison Ford is one of my favourite actors. I have seen LITERALLY every single movie he has been in, from American Graffiti (1973) onwards, and I would faint if I ever met him. Having said that, he was reason enough for me to see this movie, even if I heard it was worse than Green Lantern. Thankfully, it wasn't that bad, nowhere near it, but it wasn't AMAZING, as Captain America/Thor/First Class all were. Truthfully, it was a little silly. The plot was silly, the dialogue was silly, and yes, the premise was silly. Honestly, it seemed like Jon Favreau (of 'Iron Man' fame) wanted to make a Western, and then was kind of like 'OH SHIT THERE'S ALIENS AND SHIT WHAT THE FUCK DO WE DO' and then threw in a liberal amount of explosions, gunfights and fistfights, in addition to the aliens running around and screaming horribly in people's faces. I did NOT see this one in 3D, thankfully, and it was far more vibrant on the screen than I thought, so...yeah, keep on NOT seeing these movies in 3D!

Look, I went to this movie to see Daniel Craig (one of my favourite Bonds) and Harrison Ford (one of my favourite ACTORS) do and say ridiculous things. Olivia Wilde is absolutely gorgeous, and that's also a secondary reason I went to see it. There are explosions. People die. Aliens also die. There are fistfights, and stabbings, and gunshot wounds. A pretty fun summer movie, if you ask me. I was going to give this movie a 7/10, and that's pretty good. I then thought back to the other movies I saw this summer...I definitely enjoyed it far more than I did Harry Potter or Green Lantern, for example. As a MOVIE, it was pretty average. I feel as if Favreau would be a fine Western movie-maker, and I LOVE Westerns (the remake of '3:10 to Yuma' was just so good), so I would love to see him do this in the future. Again, though, 'Cowboys and Aliens' was a silly plot and premise and though I'm sure Favreau and everyone else involved was fully aware of that, they went ahead and tried to take it as seriously as possible. And you know what? It was good! A lot of the time when films like this take themselves seriously, it fails, but here it succeeds in large part thanks to Ford and Craig who come through with some pretty good performances. They're both kind of shady characters, and Ford is actually pretty awesome as the hardass guy who everyone is afraid of for fear of retribution. The first time we ever meet his character in the movie, he's about to torture some guy REAL good...I was saddened we didn't get to see him do some darker things, but, ah well. Craig was good as the man who can't remember his own name, and as the movie progresses, we learn his past, piece by piece...pretty fun stuff. The supporting cast, from Clancy Brown to Olivia Wilde to Sam Rockwell, they're all awesome in their own ways, despite the limited dialogue for Brown and Rockwell. Of course, Wilde is uber hot, so, yeah, she has that going for her too.

But, like I mentioned at the beginning, I am easy to please. I don't go into these movies and analyze them and say 'well, the villain wasn't layered enough!' or 'this actor didn't show proper emotions!' Who gives a goddamn? These movies are made to entertain people with explosions and gunfights and all that other stuff I mentioned. Oscar-bait this is not; it is mindless movie entertainment. Having said that, though, it's not on the same level as the comic book movies that came out this summer (again, it was way better than Green Lantern. FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS was probably better than that piece of crap), nor is it on the level of HP7.2 or Transformers 3. I DID enjoy it more than HP7.2, but I can at least be objective to know that the Harry Potter movie was far more popular than this, even though subjectively I think it was better.

Well, I've seen all the summer movies I set out to see. Here is my final ranking of them all against each other, with the rankings I gave them each in their individual blog posts:

Captain America: 8.25/10
Thor: 8/10
X-Men: First Class: 8/10
Transformers 3: 7/10
Cowboys and Aliens: 7/10
HP 7.2: 7.5/10
Pirates of the Caribbean 4: 6.5/10
Green Lantern: 2.5/10

I wish I could stress just HOW much I disliked Green Lantern even MORE, but I think you get the picture. Those are my personal scores for those movies, and I stick by them. That's also the order I preferred them in, despite their scores, but for the most part the scores do show the order and how much I liked them, so I guess it's accurate (for me, at least). For TF3 and PotC4, I had two rankings for each movie (TF3 was both 6.5 and 7 out of 10, and PotC4 was the same), but I decided to go with the scores above since thinking back, I did enjoy TF3 a lot, and I didn't enjoy PotC4 as much. Yup, I sure am a bonafide critic to be making these judgments...but seriously, I love movies, and I love writing about them, so...yarr. Cowboys and Aliens was fun. That's what I wanted, and that's what I got. Zenia probably would have complained about it had we gone to see it, so I'm glad we didn't go. KIDDING, Zenia, just kidding; you would have obviously loved it. What are the next movies I'm excited for? Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, then there's another movie with Clive Owen/Jason Statham/Robert De Niro about contract killers, then of course the aforementioned Spider-Man reboot, The Dark Knight Rises and the big one for me, The Avengers. A nice surprise I saw was the movie called 'Red Tails'....it looks SO COOL. It looks like it can be MORE than just one of these mindless movies....the trailer can be found here. Next year promises to be a big year for movies as well!