Movie Review: Real Steel

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When I was growing up there was a toy game called Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. It had two robots, a red one and a blue one, in a boxing ring being controlled by the managers who moved the robots around and pushed buttons to throw punches. When one punch landed in the right place on the opposing robot's head, it sprang up with a funny noise and that robot's manager would yell "You knocked by block off!" Well, at least they yelled in the commercials of old! Watching Real Steel immediately brought me back to that time in the past only for a moment because the movie had good enough execution that I was immediately brought back into the now to watch the near future of robotics and boxing.

In the near future, boxing is no longer done by humans. The crowds wanted more carnage than a man could either dish out or take so robots were used. Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) used to be a real boxer and now boxes with the remote controlled man-like machines. Unfortunately he hasn't done too well in the ring and owes a number of people a lot of money. After one demonstration show where his machine was taken out by a bull, he's approached by two men informing him that the mother of his son has passed away and he needs to make an appearance in family court to resolve the matter of who will become the guardian for the boy.

Max Kenton (Dakato Goyo) was abandoned by Charlie when the boy was born. Now the boy's wealthy aunt wants to adopt him and Charlie sees a way to alleviate some of his money problems. Charlie works a deal to in essence sell his rights to Max in order to purchase a new fighting robot. The catch is that Charlie has to take Max for the summer. Estranged father and son forced together for several months. Yeah, at this point, you know how part of the movie will end, the question is what road will the two travel to get there.

Charlie and Max head to the gym where Charlie was trained to pick up the new robot. The gym is now operated by the trainers daughter Bailey (Evangeline Lily) since her dad had passed away. Luckily for Charlie, not only does she know how to run the gym, she knows how to fix the big pieces of sporting metal. While Charlie attempts to leave Max with Bailey, Max won't have that. The kid manages to finagle his way into going to his first robot boxing match while sparring verbally with his dad about what they're doing. The kid has some spunk about it. Now understanding how his new robot will react is bad news for both the robot, Noisy Boy, and Charlie.

Quite frankly, if it wasn't for the character of Max and the way that Goyo played him, you wouldn't have a movie here. It’s Goyo who really carries the film. For an 11 year old Max displays knowledge beyond his years, insight into boxing and betting, and a lot of chutzpah to act the way that he does towards his father and people in the World Robot Boxing league. After Noisy Boy is destroyed in the ring, Max and Charlie break into a junk yard. Buried in the mud Max finds an old sparring robot named Atom. Without Charlie’s digging assistance, Max manages to extricate the robot out of the junk heap and back to Bailey who helps repair Atom. At times Goyo delivers the fierce determination and belief in Atom and what the bot can do and yet at times gives these sad, large Puss-in-Boot eyes when he shows vulnerability in that he wants a relationship with his dad or when he is betrayed when Charlie’s selfish streaks come to the surface.

In a true Rocky style, Atom slowly rises in the boxing community’s awareness drawing the attention of the owners of the top ranked fighting bot Zeus. Max in his exuberance of youth throws down the gauntlet taunting them. Eventually the big fight happens and I’ll let you watch the movie to see what happens from there. I’ll just say that it wasn’t a cookie cutter ending.

The movie ran for 127 minutes and had my attention the whole time. For the first show of the day, the theater was pretty packed and even though it was rated PG-13 for some violence, intense action and brief language, there were a fair number of young kids in the audience. While the robots got smashed to pieces, the worst thing that happened to a human was a fat lip and bloody nose. The movie had the action of a sports movie, but that was secondary to the father son story of Charlie and Max. Also watching these gigantic robots battle was fun and fascinating. At times real robots were used for some of the close up shots with humans while the boxing scenes were done with the motion capture to depict what a real fight was like. Enough adjustments were made to the styling of the movements to make it believable that mechanical men were swinging and pounding each other instead of flesh and blood.

I predict that the movie will do well over the weekend (update, it came in first with more than double the money that came in for the number 2 movie at the box office) and that a series of sequels based on both Charlie and Max and the robot fighting world in general will be in our near future.

The Movie Monkey

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A LOST evening in Waikiki

Living in Hawaii has its perks. The 50th state has events happening all the time. Some times it's local and other times it's on a national or even world wide state. This past weekend was one of those times when one of those world wide events happened.

The TV series LOST has been filming on O'ahu since the series started in 2004. My understanding is that all but a handful of scenes have been done here on O'ahu. Saturday night, January 30, 2010 ABC held the premiere of the final season at the Sunset on the Beach event in Waikiki.

There's been a lot of hype about this TV show and it's gained fans from all over the world. Many of whom flown from all over the world to experience this event. Luckily from my Apt in Paradise to the premiere site is only 1.5 miles as the crow flies. I hopped on the number four bus and was there in 15 minutes.

Living in Honolulu often time as I was travelling I'd see the production trucks some where. It might be in Downtown Honolulu or at the Hawaii Convention Center. It was always exciting to see them and with the advent of Twitter, Plurk and Facebook, being able to tweet out LOST is filming at such and such location. Watching the show and being able to spot locations added more excitement. Looking at a location and seeing how they might have changed it slightly to represent another location somewhere in the world added still another dimension. It's been a fun ride spotting locations.

Anticipation has been building for the closure of LOST for some time. Since Damon Linderloff and Carlton Cuse got the number of remaining episodes that ABC and their parent company Disney were going to allow, the timer started. They now knew what they had to do in order to complete the series in the time allowed. At first you would put it out of your mind, but on Saturday it hit a high point.

People were on the beach all day getting ready for the show that night. Chairs were set up in a reserved VIP area and then there was the open sand. I saw tweets that said people were already set up prior to 8AM. The day started a bit overcast, but by the time I got there it had pretty well cleared up. By the time the stars started to arrive at 5pm, it was beautiful with some clouds and the sun shining through. There was a little bit of a breeze and off shore a catamaran, and a couple of sail boats were observing the festivities as they bobbed up and down in the waves.

One by one the stars arrived to cheers from the crowd. It was funny to hear people going "who's that?" Calls to the stars by their real names and their characters names rang out to try to get their attention. My location was near the hospitality tent, but not along the main path. Some of the stars came over to our side so we could get shots. Michael Emerson (Benjamin Linus) and his wife Carrie Preston who were one of first to arrive came over and stood for shots. Naveen Andrews (Sayid) stopped off at the hospitality tent for a smoke. He then came over a little later and held his sun glasses, cigarettes and lighter behind his back as he got right up to the barricade to take photos with and sign autographs with fans. Terry O'Quinn (John Locke) even came over to one fan, took off his lei and placed it over her head. Some of the stars just rushed back and forth between the back of the stage and the hospitality tent where one of the handlers had them doing what looked like signing t-shirts.

As the sun was setting the stars gathered up by the stage and screen getting ready for introductions. Stephen McPherson President of ABC Entertainment along with Damon and Carlton took the stage to make introductions. In addition to those already mentioned, Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lily, Henry Ian Cusick, Daniel Dae Kim, Emily De Ravine, Harold Parrineau, Jorge Garcia, Yujin Kim, Nestor Carbonell, Josh Hollaway, Jeff Fahey, and Ken Leung all took their place on the stage and took their bows to the cheers and clapping of the fans. After a couple of commercials they got everyone caught up with the series by playing Everything you need to know about LOST in 8:15. Then the main event, the first hour of the two hour premiere with NO commercials! All I'm going to say is....it was *GREAT*!

After the main event was over people were scrambling to get a commemorative T-shirt. By filling out an evaluation of the episode there was a tent where you could redeem the eval for a white t-shirt. As the next episode of Modern Family played on the screen thousands of people crowded around the half dozen or so people in the tent. They had enough for everyone so there was no fighting pushing or shoving. It was very calm.

Let me say right here that if you're reading this and you made the trip to O'ahu to see the premiere, Mahalo nui! Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to visit us here. We hope that you had a great experience and will come back again. You'll need to come back and take a tour to see new locations that were used for the sixth and final season!

I would expect that locally, there will be two more times when there will be a lot of LOST activity in the news. First will be the last day of filming. When they make the call "That's a wrap" bringing the final scene to a close it will probably be all over the local media. The second would be when the final show airs sometime in May. I expect this event to play out on a world wide scale. Who knows, maybe they'll do a Sunset on the Beach on a Tuesday for the last episode. Here's hoping!