American Ultra

My husband likes spy movies, so he wanted to see this. I thought the premise sounded interesting until about 30 seconds into the movie. When he sold me on the movie, he didn't mention that the main characters were stoners. I knew from the moment I saw them pass the bong that this was not going to be a good movie. Nonetheless, I was surprised at just how bad it got.

I think you were supposed to be stoned while watching this movie, in order to not notice that the scenes didn't flow, and there was no logical progression from one thought to the next. I mean, really you end up with the guy you thought was the head of the CIA being murdered in the woods by the real head of the CIA, a character you haven't seen at all yet. It's ridiculous.

At some point you realize that Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is former CIA herself, and quit her entire real life to be with this stoner guy she's supposed to be handling. Then she becomes a stoner herself, and falls in love with him. Even though she's lying to him not only about who she is but about who he is. But then you have to realize the whole Hawaii trip is her fault.

She knew he couldn't leave the town without violent panic attacks but she took him to the airport to go to Hawaii and then got mad at him because he couldn't leave. But she was the only one who knew why he couldn't leave! Also, the CIA is trying to kill him for trying to leave town, so clearly his handler should know that he's not allowed to leave town, and maybe, just maybe, she would try to encourage him not to leave town instead of trying to encourage him to leave town.

Overall, I give the movie an F for not thinking itself through and not having a plausible plot.

Justice League: Doom

I watched this movie with my husband, who is determined to get me to like DC characters and stories. For some reason he seems determined that because I like Marvel comic books and comic book characters I should like DC comic book characters. However, I feel that DC overpowers their characters, and doesn't make them likable. I mean, come on, they have a character that the way to kill her is to make her think she's still in a fight she can't give up? It's stupid.

This movie is about a supervillain who collects a group of people who hate the Justice League and then pays them to follow Batman's plan to neutralize his friends. Although Batman made the plans to neutralize the Justice League, he also had plans to neutralize his own plans. Thus there really wasn't any stress to the movie. Once Batman managed to punch his way out of his parents' grave, he had the plan to fix everyone else's problem.

The movie expected you to already know who everyone was. The closest to an introduction you got to the bad guys was that they all wanted an individual Justice Leaguer dead. I guess it would have been too much for a short movie to explain, but it did seem like it required a little more explanation of who the characters were and what their super powers are.

Overall, I alternated between bored and confused. What was this chemical the Martian character was sweating out? Why did he or I care? Why are they all afraid of solar flares? Don't we get those every day and find them harmless? Yet the bad guy's plan is to cause them? Why did Green Lantern just put down his ring and cry?

I have to give it an F.

Timeline

I was excited that this movie was made, because I really enjoyed the book. When my husband told me there had been a movie made of it, I didn't know how I had managed to miss it. I was excited to watch.

This movie started out poorly, with a man running through the forest, and winding up in the dessert, dying, accompanied by scary music. We come to find out that he's a time traveller, but we never get an explanation for why he wound up in the dessert when our other time travellers all wind up back in the lab.

It is really over-acted. They also start out by killing a whole bunch of characters right at the beginning. I guess this is a good time to do it because it saved me from starting to care about the dead characters. However, it did seem over done, and by the time the movie was halfway over, I couldn't care about any of the characters because they'd killed too many of them.

Some of the actors looked too much alike and it was hard to tell them apart. It was also, therefore, hard to care about them. By the time the movie was halfway over, I was looking at my watch waiting for it to end, and looking online for someone to chat with through the rest of it.

Michael Crichton, the author of Timeline, wrote in Jurassic Park, "just because scientists can, does that mean they should," or something along those lines. I feel like this movie was another excuse to say the same line, and that really all of Crichton's work falls along these lines. Just because scientists can invent time travel doesn't mean that they should. As a part of the larger body of works, this fails because it becomes cliche.

The movie did do a semi-good job explaining itself if you hadn't read the book, which is good because I think most people didn't read this book. However, it failed to give plausible explanations for anything that happened. I think that may have been a flaw in the book, too.

I'm trying hard to find a redeeming quality about the movie, but I really can't. I give it an F.