We just got done watching the movie “Role Models”, and it was a lot better than I thought it would be.  I went into it thinking it would just be the latest typical, dopy Will Ferrel-ish type of comedy, but it ended up being really original and I ended up laughing most of the way through the movie.  I think Paul Rudd may be the new Will Farell or Adam Sandler actually, he’s had quite a few funny hits on his hands lately, and it looks like he cowrote this film, which is to his credit because the script is hilarious.

The movie is about a guy named Danny, played by Paul Rudd, and his buddy, played by Sean William Scott (who by the way plays pretty much the same character as he was made famous for, Stiffler, from the American Pie movies), who both work together for an energy drink company that goes around to schools and pedals their product to kids.  Paul feels like it’s poison, and he has a breakdown after his dead end life seems to take a turn for the worse, going on a bender of misbehavior and ending up having to serve 150 hours of community service with Scott to avoid doing jail time.

They are placed with a nonprofit organization that does Big Brother types of things for kids that don’t have a parent around to be their role model.  Rudd gets a kid, played by the same guy who played McLovin, who loves to play some weird role playing game where adults meet in person to have battles and the like, sort of like Dungeons and Dragons, and Scott gets a punk kid who likes to swear and who’s “Bigs” quit several times over because he was such a hand full for them.

Of course, hilarity ensues, and we have scenes that will literally leave you roling on the floor with Role Models.  I’d highly recommend you rent it if you want to get a good laugh!

We got out this weekend and went and saw the new Star Trek movie, the effort by director JJ Abrams to revive the series into a new franchise where the story is told from the beginning about how all the loved characters from the series and the ensuing movies, Spock, Kirk, Checkov, Scottie, Uhura, and the rest of the gang came to be together on the star ship Enterprise.   The movie starts off with a charged battle scene between Kirk’s dad, who becomes immediately in charge of a doomed ship when they come in contact with an alien ship with a leader who has a serious chip on his shoulder about something for which we don’t find out til later in the movie.

The villain here is played by Eric Bana, whom I’ve never seen in anything I liked, but I gotta say, he did a great job in heavy makeup and almost unrecognizable as the main villain named Nero of the alien race Romulan.  I recognized the voice from somewhere, but didn’t know it was Bana until the end credits and was amazed at how good he was in this role since I’ve found him to be pretty wooden in his other roles, and unrelatable.

The movie finds itself tangled in a lot of time travel and “what happened if this didn’t happen and now this happened” kind of stuff, which, if you’ve seen Abrams produced show Lost, you know is pretty par for the course.  It also allows the movie to stray from previous story lines and tell a story that never really should have happened.  The young Spock is played well by Zachary Quinto, who if you watch the horrible show Heroes (it’s gone way downhill in my opinion), plays one of the only decent characters in the show who can also act (most of the cast is seriously challenged in the actin arena).

We get to see a cameo from Spock himself, Leonard Nemoy, so I’m sure that true trekkies loved that part.  I must say when you see him, it does kind of bring back some sort of nostalgic feelings for the original show, which I never watched regularly as a kid but I definitely liked it every time I saw.  Remember, that was the days before DVR’s, so if I caught it, I caught it!

Overall, Star Trek is a pretty good movie.  I was entertained up until about the last half hour, which I thought could have been cut shorter without sacrificing the story line.