Insidious is....

      
...some good scares at the beginning of the movie that regrettably don't hold in its second part.

Where is Zelda Rubinstein when you need her?

The movie's premise is a haunting, but with the twist that it occurs not to a house but to a boy.  The first few scares are really good, but once Barbara Hershey enters the picture, it goes downhill.  It has nothing to do with Ms. Hershey, but with an evident lack of focus.  On this same note, the make-up and special effects are sub-par, causing the viewer to get out of the movie.  It tries to be a modern day Poltergeist, but that picture is leap and bounds better than Insidious.  

Four out of ten stars.

    

Pirates of the Caribbean 4- on Familiar Tides

    
Pirates of the Caribbean is just mindless entertainment.  Some of the stories are rethreads of the previous movies, with similar characters. The movie could have benefited from been shorter in length and more focused in its story lines.  I would have preferred to see more of Barbossa and less of the Orlando Bloom look-alike.  That specific story arc did not function properly in the movie.

Leaving somebody in a deserted island?  Sounds familiar...

But it is welcome that less CGI was used in this movie than in the previous ones.  Moreover, some of it was filmed here in Puerto Rico (I recognized the entrance to the Caverns of the Camuy River, as well as small island in the east of Puerto Rico.  If you are ever in Puerto Rico, go to this park, it is amazing).

This is the entrance to the Caverna Clara in Camuy.

Six stars out of ten.

Thor: With lower expectations come great surprises

What, this is not Spiderman?

I went to Thor expecting a silly, mostly camp movie (and not in a good way).  But lo and behold, I was greatly surprised.  Thor is a very entertaining popcorn movie that did something unexpected: all the story is the origin story, with the villain intertwined in this story.  In this regard, it did not take the path most threaded by most superhero movies (almost half the movie is an origin story and the other half fighting the bad guy).

Further, a lot of the movie takes place in Asgard, not on Earth.  The visuals are remarkable, specially the rainbow bridge (Idris Elba as the gatekeeper was one of the best parts of the movie).  This, for me, made the difference.  The action and pace of the movies are good although not outstanding.  But you will have a "gay old time" at the movies.

For those of you of a certain age, below the intro to the old cartoon show:

Seven and a half stars out of ten.

To Touch the Sky/Tocar el cielo

In this movie, several stories are intertwined via familial bonds, even though the action takes place in Argentina and Spain.  The movie is somewhat muddled for it.  It involves the marriage for convenience of a Spanish woman with an Argentinian man in Argentina, because she wants to adopt a child (this story is underdeveloped).  In Spain, a father (named Pedro) has a dysfunctional relationship with his son, with his best girl friend Gloria (not a girlfriend per se), and with his mother, who lives in Argentina.   The movie begins on New Year's Eve, with everybody writing down their wishes and tying them to balloons filled with helium (hence the title of the movie).  As the movie unfolds, Gloria is diagnosed with cancer, which serves as a catalyst to the denouement of the action. 

The acting is somewhat uneven.  The character portraying Pedro is mostly over the top, and his relationship with his son and his mother (an excellent China Zorilla) is not credible.  The movie is interesting, although it takes its time to move the action forward.  Nonetheless, it is entertaining in spite of its obvious flaws.

On a side note, the IMDB's page for this movie has the wrong poster.  The poster there is for a movie called Make a Wish, which appears to be a horror movie (although disfunctional families sometimes are horrors stories). 

Seven stars out of ten. 

Source Code and The Beatles

Last Saturday I went to the movies with some friends.  As always, my best friend chose the movie, this time, "Source Code".  The premise of the movie is simple, but garbled with a lot of mumbo jumbo:  you can tap into the lingering conscience of a dead person and experience their last eight minutes on this Earth.  As expected, the military forces had developed a mechanism to use this.  In the specific case of "Source Code", it is to discover a terrorist that has planted a bomb in a train and also has a dirty bomb for Chicago.

What, are we going to die again?

One of my problems with the movie came the first time we see/live through the eight minutes (and we suffer through the eight minutes several times), because I was able to pinpoint who the terrorist was (it was pretty obvious), which spoiled the movie for me.  Moreover (and this is something I also deplore of the Harry Potter movies in their pensieve scenes), if you are tapping into somebody's conscience, are you not restricted by what that person saw or felt during those eight minutes?  Aren't we supposed to only see what that person saw?  Then, how come we followed Jake Gyllenhaal to a train station (he was following an Indian or Arabic guy), and then see the train explode in the distance when he was supposed to be inside the train?  How can they tap the lingering conscience of a dead person who was never at that station during his last eight minutes alive?  Be advised that the last scenes of the movie try to explain this (for me the explanation came too late in the movie).

These issues took me out of the movie.  Hence, I couldn't enjoy it to the fullest.  Nonetheless, the acting was very strong throughout.  I give a shout out to Vera Farmiga, who did not really have a fully developed character as written, but she made wonders with what little she had.

As a curious note, in the final credits Eleanor Rigby was credited (I think).  In her honor, the following Beatles' song from The Yellow Submarine movie (which is appropriate due to the state of Jake's character):

6.5 stars out of 10.

Battle Los Angeles

I went to the movies last week with some friends and we chose this movie. In one phrase, and as my dad says, it was very average ("bastante regular"). It reminded me somewhat of Starship Troopers, although Battle LA was not as entertaining. I have only what question: what happened with character development? Pacing? The movie was explosions all the time, with little space to breathe.

A very average 4 stars (from 10 stars).