24 hours of pain.

Gah this movie was a painful experience.  It felt less like watching a movie and more like sitting on an airplane next to a creepy, smelly homeless man while a little kid spends the whole flight kicking the back of your seat.  (Airplane image courtesy of the movie t shirt category)  I can’t say it didn’t elicit emotions from me, but those emotions were frustration, annoyance, massive depression, and anger.

I suppose I could look at this as a sign of my new found dedication to my movie reviewing past  time.  I could have not seen something.  I could have seen Point Blank, a French action movie that looked kind of interesting.  Why this flick?  Well, in part because my bad reviews tend to be funnier and more entertaining.  The main reason, however, was that the other night I had a blow struck to my confidence and needed to prove to myself that I could accurately assess whether a movie sucks from the trailer.  You see I went into Our Idiot Brother expecting it to blow and it was actually kind of fun.  So I went to this dog and was gratified (on some levels) to discover that my trailer based assessment was dead on the money.

Speaking of money, to greater enhance my sense of violation I paid full price for this dog.  In most cases if I am going to pay someone to punch me in the stomach I’ll at least haggle a bit.

The movie (SPOILER ALERT-I don’t expect anyone with any kind of taste to see this dog, so I am going to totally spoil the crap out of it.  If you read the book no problem, but if you are a glutton for punishment and want to see it skip to the last paragraph).  It’s called One Day because it takes place on July 15th on each year from 1988 to 2011.  While I appreciate an alternative to traditional story telling, trust me when I say this tends to really screw the story up.  This movie was based on a well received book, and I can see how this format would work with each day being a different chapter, but as a movie it is painfully disjarring.  The biggest issue for me was the fact that one of the years you would see a happy, fun time by both characters and the next you would be subject to some horribly depressing crap that would make you want to throw yourself down the theater stairs.  Anne Hathaway stars as Emma, a British girl (with an accent that seems to waver in and out like a fast moving tide) and Jim Sturgess plays Dexter, a rich British ne’er do well.  They meet upon graduation in 1988 and almost but not quite sleep together.  Emma is the nerdy but cute girl and Dexter is the hot young stud (of England).  Anyway, they enter into a 20 year contest to prove which of them is the most annoying human being on the planet.  Dexter becomes a successful TV personality and a jerk with a drug and alcohol problem while Emma wastes her life serving tables in a Mexican food Chucky Cheeses.  Then Dexter’s life tanks while Emma becomes a successful writer of some kind.  During all this time they are frustrating each other (and the audience) by almost but never sleeping together, often in cruel ways.  You end up hating Dexter for being a sleazy layabout and hating Emma for being a mousy, low confidence nobody.  Finally they both grow up and and get married.  At that moment I started to get some satisfaction from the film, as they both were treating each other decently and it looked like a good romance and fulfilling relationship was developing.  At that exact moment (BIG SPOILER ALTER RIGHT HERE–>) Emma gets hit by a truck and killed.  No joke.  She was also by that point the loser in the most hated human on the planet contest and was the character I liked the best, so after an hour and a half of failing to get me to connect with the characters the movie finally did so, only to kill her off.  I was seriously depressed, and not in the good “have a chick cry and feel better about yourself” way but more in the “go home and cut your arm up with an Xacto knife” way. By the way, the truck accident was shockingly graphic.  Like Meet Joe Black graphic.

Then, as if life wasn’t sucking enough already, the movie had to go on for another 20 pointless, painful, awkward minutes while Dexter came to grips with crap.  The movie flashes back to the day in 1988 when they first met and I suppose was intended to be heartwarming, but knowing her eventual fate made watching them as a young couple even more painful.  It ended with Dexter and his daughter (from a different marriage) more or less talking about Emma and enjoying a tender moment, but at that point I was torn between wanting to kill myself or the projectionist.

I woke up this morning still pissed off and depressed from this movie, by the way.  I really just want to end this review now and skip the whole stars/black holes thing, but I feel I have an obligation to carry it through.

The stars.  I really am crazy for Anne Hathaway, and her with her nerdy glasses really did something for me.  One star.  Acting was decent all around.  One star.  Shot in England, so the scenery was pretty.  One star.  Watching Dexter’s TV career tank was oddly amusing.  One star.  Total: four stars.

The black holes.  Depressing.  Two black holes.  Frustrating.  One black hole.  Infuriating.  One black hole.  Killing my favorite character.  One black hole.  The whole sudden shift of tone from day to day thing.  One black hole. Forcing us to watch 90 minutes of foreplay with no consummation.  One black hole.  Anne Hathaway’s accent kept shifting gears.  One black hole (sorry Anne.  I still love you).  The film blatently manipulated my emotions.  One black hole.  Dragging the film out for another 20 minutes after it more or less died.  One black hole. There was not a single truly satisfying moment in the entire movie.  One black hole.   One more black hole for making me want to punch holes in my wall this morning.  Total: twelve black holes.

So a total of eight black hole.  Look, I’m not saying all movies have to end happy and upbeat.  I actually like a dark twist.  I just don’t want to be sold on the idea of a love story only to have it turn into Sophies Choice.  Just look at the poster for it on IMDB.  It shows young Dexter and Emma romantically kissing in a passionate embrace.  There is nothing that says by the end of the movie you will be looking for a bridge to jump off of.

I don’t know.  Maybe this thing hit home a little hard because I am single and bitter about it.  If I had had someone’s hand to hold while watching it I might have been better able to deal with what was going on.  Odds are this movie would have made me cherish a girlfriend a lot more.  Hell, I might have even been secure enough to cry a little and feel better afterwards (don’t bet on it.  I’m all man, baby).  As it is, I am really wishing I had gone to see the new Spy Kids movie instead.

Anyway, after this bitchy, depressing blog it would not surprise me if you never came back here again, but if you did be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed and follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu.  Also, if you are a single woman 27-38 who even slightly resembles Anne Hathaway let’s just say this movie has made me particularly receptive for the next week or so, so drop me a Tweet.  Thanks.  Everyone have a great day.

Not as idiotic as I thought it would be

I’m not saying this movie is great.  It is not a milestone in road of cinema history.  It is not even a cobblestone.  On the other hand, it’s not a washed out bridge either.  I think the best way to describe this film is with “in-” words.  Inoffensive.  Pleasantly innocuous.  This movie is like watching two dogs play in a park.  Fun to watch, but except for a warm, pleasant feeling you won’t gain a lot from it.  It sets out to make you feel good, and accomplishes that goal.

I’ll say this has been a lesson for me in the “you can’t judge a book by it’s cover” vein, although in this case it’s you can’t judge a movie by it’s poster.  I never saw a trailer but when I saw the poster said to myself “There is no way this cannot suck”.  I really thought this was another load of excrement dumped into the sewer of bad rated R comedies I have been drowning in all summer.  Wrong.  It was really not bad.  I left the theater feeling OK about the universe.

Not that the movie doesn’t have it’s faults, which I will get into shortly in excruciating detail.  I also have a couple of personal issues with the premise, the first being that I have moments of absolute contempt for the whole hippy movement.  I grew up in the 80′s, and there was very little that annoyed me more than aging hippies telling me how great the free love was back in the 60′s and 70′s.  Sorry, but I couldn’t even talk to a girl without tripping on my tongue back then and the whole free love thing had been replaced by leg warmers and big hair.  Listening to some long haired smelly old pot head drone on about it is the equivalent of a rich man going to a Greyhound station and telling everyone how great it is to live in a mansion.  Screw you, hippy!  (South Park image courtesy of the funny t shirt category).

The other thing about this movie is I have two sisters, and have been called the idiot brother myself.  That being said, I don’t think my interaction was ever this weird with my sisters.

Anyway, the movie.  Ned (Paul Rudd, who until now has mostly had supporting roles in movies like Knocked Up, the 40 Year Old Virgin, and Dinner for Schmucks) is a Jesus looking smelly (I assume.  None that I have known were renowned for their hygiene) hippy who gets busted for selling pot to a uniformed cop.  This sounds like the dumbest move ever, and actually threw up a warning flag for me early on, but as you get to know Ned you kind of get where he was coming from.  Anyway, he spends eight months in jail and comes out to find that his girlfriend is kicking him out and keeping his dog, Willie Nelson.  I mention this because the dog is pretty much the only motivation Ned has to do anything during the entirety of the film.  Anyway, he heads into New York city to couch surf with his three dysfunctional sisters: a bitchy, bossy high strung magazine writer (Elizabeth Banks-the 40 Year Old Virgin, Spiderman), a bisexual girl with no apparent job who can’t control her libido (Zooey (Zoo-ey?  How do you pronounce that?) Deschanel-Almost Famous, Your Highness, a bunch of other stuff I never heard of), and a downtrodden housewife married to a complete lame, pretentious intelligentsia filmmaker who is working on making some dumb documentary and raising the wimpiest kid in human history (Emily Mortimer-Shutter Island, Lars and the Real Girl, 30 Rock, and a bunch of other movies I never heard of.  Her husband is Steve Coogan, from Tropic Thunder and the horrible Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief) who also can’t control his libido (relationship betrayal is something of a theme for this movie).  Anyway, Ned is a loose cannon in all of their lives, seemingly wrecking them all, but the truth is he is more exposing the hypocrisy they all had riding under the surface.  He didn’t cause any of the people with relationships to get into cheating situation.  Just exposed it all.  Throughout the film he bumbles along with a faith in people and an innocent belief that if you trust each other you won’t get burned.  It is kind of annoying at first but by the end I was kind of buying into the vibe (time to go download some Grateful Dead songs, I guess).

Anyway, sibling hijinks ensues.  All three sisters have their lives turned upside down and then somehow set back upright again.  Ned gets his dog back.

The stars.  I felt kind of good watching this movie.  I can’t put my finger on why, but I left with a warm feeling in my cold, dark heart.  Two stars.  All the acting was really good.  One star.  The dialog felt like brothers and sisters arguing.  One star.  All the sisters were pretty easy on the eyes, especially Elizabeth Banks, and they had a bunch of other hot sophisticated New York women, particularly my future wife Janet Montgomery (the casting person obviously shared my preferences, as there was not a blond to be seen).  One star.  There was a supporting hippy character that was actually really funny, and his sisters lesbian girlfriend was pretty cool too (Rashida Jones, whom I fell in love with in the Office).  Also his parole officer was cool and added to the film.  One star.  The dog was really a cool looking dog (a beautiful Golden Retriever).  One star.  They didn’t try to shove a love story into the film for Ned.  One star.  Ned’s nephew was in training by is overprotective parents to be a victim for life but kind of turned out cool.  One star.  Overall a pleasant movie going experience.  Two stars.  Total: eleven stars.

The black holes.  Hippies.  One black hole.  The love interest for the bitchy magazine sister kind of bugged me.  One black hole.  The three sisters, in spite of having completely different lives, were kind of interchangeable to the point that I had to struggle to keep track of which one was which.  The only one that stood out was the housewife, and that was only because she was the only non-brunette.  One black hole.  While Ned’s innocence and trust was refreshing, I found myself wanting to reach into the movie and shake him for being such a dope.  One black hole.  The filmmaker character kind of bugged me too.  He was sleazy from the get go and gave the film a greasy feeling every time he was on screen, to it’s detriment (greasy film?  Me so funny!).  One black hole.  Total: five black holes.

Total of six stars, a great score for a Rated R comedy.  I was honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed the experience, and this film is a candidate for best feel good film of the year when I get around to doing my end of the year awards (probably some time in June, given how I keep up on these things).  Definitely worth watching, definitely a good date film.  It won’t stick in your brain and you won’t be quoting it, however.  Nothing in this requires a big screen, so if you want to wait for NetFlix that is cool.  Thanks again, and don’t forget to sign up for the RSS feed and follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu.  Talk to you soon.

Kind of a surprising week.  I thought I was going to love Colombiana and was really disappointed.  I kind of thought this was going to be yet another dumb ass horror movie and loved it.

Don’t be Afraid of the Dark is, in my less than humble opinion, the best horror movie this year.  It is super creepy, the terror builds up over time, and you honestly care about the characters and are worried about what is going to happen to them.  Best of all, it does not at all rely on slasher gore or body count.  There is actually very little death, and yet somehow it comes across as more horrible than some maniac running across town with a chainsaw.

This actually got me thinking quite a bit about horror and why movies like this work so well when every teenage slasher film leaves me bored (Texas Chainsaw Massacre image courtesy of the horror movie t shirt category).  Some good examples of movies low body count thinking horror would be the Shining and the Ring.  I think it is several levels.  First of all, when we are introduced to 10 different teenyboppers who are all destined to die on the edge of a machete we can never really develop any kind of connection with them.  The movie starts off with us knowing that most of them are going to die in ridiculous ways and the only thing we do is try to figure out which of them is going to survive (typically the hottish, nerd girl.  See, ladies?  There are serious advantages to being a girl nerd.  Join us on the nerd side).  In a movie where we are only given a couple of characters and have to interact with them throughout the film, especially when one of them is an innocent and troubled child or equally sympathetic character, we the audience really start to care and worry about them.  I was on the edge of my seat hoping the little girl in this film made it out OK.

The other thing that makes films like this work my personal theory of concept horror verses hind brain horror.  A maniac running around killing people with a glove full of knives is more of a hind brain, adrenalin rush film that is designed to trigger your fight-or-flight response.  The problem is you get desensitized to it pretty quick.  The spiky adrenalin rush you feel from Freddy’s first kill fades to almost boredom by the tenth, and then if you see the next sequel in turn (or even another slasher film) you are more or less over the whole idea and at that point you are more into seeing what kind of creative ways the director can come up with for the next kill.  In most cases it devolves into almost comedy.  In a concept horror film, the director lets your own imagination terrify you.  We are always better at scaring ourselves when given the chance.  As a child I was absolutely convinced there was a crocodile living on the floor of my room at night and he would bite off any part of my body I dared stick beyond the edge of my bed (my parents had him relocated to a zoo as my eleventh birthday present.  Thanks, mom and dad).  That is real horror.  In films like this the story presents you with a creepy situation and then lets your imagination run with it.  What are those monsters?  What do they really want?  What are they going to do with that girl?  Your brain keeps feeding you worse and worse scenarios.

Not that this movie doesn’t have it’s problems.  For one thing, the main bulk of the story we have all seen before.  A lonely and troubled child in a huge, creepy mansion is beset by supernatural terrors while her parents remain blithely and almost willfully ignorant.  Another thing is the creatures, who start off terrifying and mysterious, get more and more exposed as the film progresses and take on a comedic aspect.  Fortunately by that time your connection with the young girl and the two adults is strong enough to carry through.  Not even sure they could have avoided that, as they had to show them sometime.  Finally, while I was extremely sympathetic and liked the little girl a lot, she was dumber than a sack of hammers.  Maybe I’m fooling myself, but I can’t think there was ever an age where I was dumb enough to stick my head into a dark culvert in a super creepy basement just because some evil sounding voice told me to.  Of course my childhood is no barometer for average children’s behavior, but still.

Anyway, the move.  A very young Sally (played brilliantly by Bailee Madison.  Where do these great child actors keep coming from?  I predict impressive things from this young lady coming up) is being sent off by her more or less negligent party mother to live with her father Alex (Guy Pearce, the Hurt Locker, L.A. Confidential, Momento) and his girlfriend Kim (played by Scientology weirdo Katie Holmes.  You know, I always thought she would have a more impressive film biography, but except for Batman Begins and Dawsons Creek she has been in nothing but crap.  Oh, wait.  Thank you for Smoking was pretty good too) in their super creepy fixer-upper mansion.  Sorry, but if some real estate agent shows you a house and the front door is carved to look like a giant Japanese Manga squid monster attacking, punch him in the face and then try to run him over in your car as you leave.  This place made the House on Haunting Hill look like Peewee’s Playhouse (also kind of creepy, but for other reasons).  Anyway, Alex is some kind of architect who is down on his luck and has invested every dime in restoring this old house in an attempt to get it on the cover of Architectural Digest.  We are never told why his career tanked or how this magazine cover will save it and, to be honest, it kind of bugged me.  Kim is his interior decorator/live in girlfriend who is trying to form an attachment with Sally, who really wants nothing to do with it.  Meanwhile, you hear creepy voices and see the green glowing eyes of dozens of rat sized creatures in a metal grate in the even creepier basement.  They convince Sally to open the grate.  They are afraid of bright light, so we are treated to all kinds of cool lighting for effect shots.  They want to kidnap and probably kill Sally.  The entire rest of the film is them stalking Sally while her dad and Kim believe she is having some kind of mental breakdown.  Honestly, there isn’t much more I want to tell you about the story, as it would be quite the spoiler and I think you should all see this.

The stars.  Super, duper, awesomely terrifying and creepy.  Three stars.  Amazing camera and lighting effects.  Two stars.  Bailee Madison was freaking awesome.  Two stars.  The creatures, once you saw them, were really cool and creepy with good CGI.  One star.  A horror movie that relies on story and great camera work rather than body count to make the horror happen.  One star.  The set was really well done also.  One star.  Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes were both pretty good.  One star.  A rated R movie that didn’t need gore and/or nudity (although I was hopeful).  One star.  Great ending with a cool twist.  One star.  Two more stars for a great movie experience.  Total: fifteen stars.

The black holes.  Sally’s bad decision making process kind of bummed me out.  One black hole.  The fact that we never find out why Alex is in such desperate straits with regards to his career when it is such a critical plot point that they remain in Creepy Mansion was annoying.  One black hole.  We also never find out what was up with party mom, which was also a key plot point.  One black hole.  Alex’s inability to listen to the serious needs of his child (even if she were imagining the creatures and they weren’t really alive, this is some serious crap any responsible parent would have to at least pay attention to her) really made me lose most of my sympathy for him.  One black hole.  There was a definite moment where any rational person would have bugged the hell out and set fire to the place as they left, but they didn’t.  One black hole.  Too much exposure to the creatures made them lose a lot of their menace towards the end.  One black hole.  Total: six black hole.

In the irksome category I will say this film is extremely derivative of a bunch of other films, particularly the Shining.  This doesn’t get  a black hole because it is an extremely good derivative and, honestly, there are so many movies out these days that it is nigh impossible to come out with something that doesn’t smack of something else.

A grand total of nine stars, a great score and at least 4-5 higher than I would have thought it would get when I was waiting on line to get my popcorn.  I highly recommend you all see it if you are looking for a thrill.  This, by the way, is a great date film in that it is not a slasher, has a very sympathetic little girl, and if your date isn’t clutching your arm and/or climbing into your lap by the end of it I would check her afterward to make sure her robot batteries are fully charged.

By the way, follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu.  Fun!

Luc Besson sequels the Professional by making Kill Bill.

OK, I was sold on this movie by the trailer.  I guess I am a sucker for slick media campaigns (by the way, have you seen the new Slim Jim commercials?  I have been eating those things by the bushel).  As I gain experience in the movie review world I am learning to watch out for certain things, and movies that are released in late August generally seem to be the wimpy kids that are picked last for softball in grade school (something I know a good amount about).  Was this movie bad?  Not especially.  Was it good?  Not especially.  It had some good elements, but overall seemed a little confused and disjointed.  I think “meh” best describes it.

After seeing the movie last night I was kind of perplexed as to the origin and did a little research.  Apparently this was supposed to be the sequel to the Professional and Luc wrote it with adult Natalie Portman in mind.  After she passed he rewrote it with a South American back story stapled to the front end and ran with it.  It did star another unrequited love of my life, Zoe Saldana, which was a big plus (I fell in love with her as a big blue alien in Avatar.  Yes, I am one of those guys).

What is the real problem with this film?  Well, it has several, including the fact that Luc Besson was “inspired” by about 2o different movies, but the real issue with this film can be summed up in one rating: PG-13.  This movie really should have gone hard core for an R rating, and not just so I could see some gratuitous nudity on the screen.  The combat seemed tame and disconnected, which aggravated the incredulity the audience has to constantly fight when watching a 90 pound girl beat the hell out of dozens of fully grown and extremely well armed men (sorry, ladies.  I am sure there are any number of martial arts trained women out there who could beat the hell out of me.  I just have a hard time believing Zoe Saldana has the upper body strength to pull herself out of a wrestling hold with a dude.  Hate me if you have to).  I’m not saying I can’t suspend my disbelief enough to make it work.  I’m just saying in order for me to believe it I actually need to see the violence and gore in a realistic, R rated manner.  Also, a little gratuitous nudity would not have hurt.

By the way, I thought at first Colombiana was the female form of Colombian in Spanish, but a little research shows that it is actually a term for black people living in Colombia.  Not the most racially sensitive term I have heard used for a movie title, and I am reasonably sure a little research might show it is kind of derogatory.  Not that Luc Besson is known for being PC.

Anyway, the movie.  A young Colombian girl (Amandla Stenberg) has her parents killed in some kind of drug deal gone bad.  She has some kind of data chip (this is 1992.  Were they making mini disks the size of dimes back then?) her father gave her that has details of the bad guy’s never defined business.  We see yet ANOTHER parkour chase scene through a South American hillside city slum (it really, really, really looks like Rio de Janeiro, in spite of the fact that is is supposed to be in Colombia) where an eight year old girl managed to give about 20 armed men the slip and also has the strength to lift a manhole cover from the inside (I know this is petty, but I am going to give them a black hole for this.  I happen to know from personal experience that manhole covers start at 300 pounds and go up from there, and are really hard for a grown man to lift from the inside (please don’t ask me how I know this).  This little girl lifts one like it was made of Styrofoam (it probably was).  Can movie makers not respect their audience on any level, please?).  Anyway, she uses the disk to get a ticket to American from the CIA, where she gives her handler the slip and travels to Chicago to hook up with her uncle, who in a blatant example of bad parenting decisions agrees to train her as an assassin.  Skip forward 15 years and she is now a professional killer who uses her sex appeal, appearance, and lithe form to get into places others can’t.  She is on a personal revenge kick after the Don who killed her parents, but does contract jobs for her uncle (he is also some kind of ill defined crime lord.  How do these people make money, besides from murder for hire?).  Somehow he is cool with her killing for money from all of his clients but freaks out when he finds out she is killing the people who killed her family (see what I mean about disjointed).

Anyway, a bunch of minor characters and sub plots, including an FBI investigation and some kind of CIA cover up, are introduced and go nowhere.  Soft core explosive hijinks ensues.  Henchmen die in droves.  The part time love interest manages to completely screw up the girl’s life and more or less is forgiven in spite of directly causing the deaths of pretty much all of her friends and relatives.  Other movies are blatantly plagiarized.  More stuff blows up.  The end.

The stars.  Zoe Saldana, and while it was a PG-13 the director (Olivier Megaton???  No joke, he took this name because he was born on the 20th anniversary of atomic bombing of Hiroshima.  What an a-hole.  I wonder if he knows Megatron.  Rising Sun image courtesy of the political t shirts category) took every single opportunity to show as much kid safe skin as possible.  A scene doesn’t go by without Zoe running around in panties and bra, or skin tight body suit.  Let’s just say wherever they were shooting this flick must have been cold.  One star.  One thing Luc Besson can do is write action scenes, even if they are really derivative of a bunch of other movies and a little hard to believe.  One star.  Revenge movie.  One star.  Somewhat exciting.  One star.  Lots of guns and explosives.  One star.  The opening hit, where she has to sneak into the Bakersfield police station (I’ve been to Bakersfield many times, and the police there are far less incompetent than this film makes them out to be.  They also have a reputation in the Central Valley as being quick on the trigger, so take it from me, don’t mess with them) is actually really cool in a sneaky crime sort of way.  One star.  Filming was reasonably competent, and the running chase scene from early on (as lame is it was from a logical point of view) was well executed.  One star.  Total: seven stars.

Now the black holes.  PG-13 when it should have been R.  One black hole.  Acting start to finish was flat and uninspired.  One black hole.  Little girl lifting manhole cover.  One black hole.  Subplots and minor characters that add nothing and go nowhere.  One black hole.  A really dumb scene where the little girl’s uncle pulls a gun out and shoots up a passing random car on a busy street in order to make a point to the girl, then sits there for about half an hour lecturing her before walking away with no consequences whatsoever (pretty much a rip off of the scene of Natalie Portman shooting out the window in the Professional, although I can’t call it plagiarism as Luc Besson wrote that too.  I guess he really likes his own writing).  One black hole.  Every time they added a scene where they tried to inject some kind of emotion it was awkward and too brief and simplistic.  Basically brought whatever momentum the movie had a that point to a crashing halt.  One black hole.  For someone who has worked for 15 years to kill a specific man, the girl kind of left his final death in the hands of fate.  No real backup plan for any of her hijinks, but I guess that is typical Luc Besson.  One black hole.  While the gun fight scenes were pretty well shot and reasonably coherent, the one really big melee fight scene devolved into a million 1-1.5 second edits.  I hate that fight scene style.  Gives me a headache and no idea of who is doing what to whom.  It pretty much says either the fight coordinator sucked (or didn’t exist) or the actors involved lacked the basic martial arts skills to reasonably execute more than one punch or kick in a row.  One black hole.  Story was overly complicated in a dumb way.  A complicated story is good if the complications enhance the story and add depth.  This was just complicated for complications sake, and really dragged down the story.  One black hole.  Total: eight black holes.

In the irksome category, I have some issues with the father.  If you are going to confront your crime boss and you think there is a reasonable chance he will want to kill you and your whole family, would you not take the precaution of maybe having your wife and daughter somewhere other than where the bad guy knows they are?  I’m just saying.  If you are planning on leaving the country anyway (this was implied) and are about to have it out with the big man, maybe have your daughter and wife on a flight that leaves an hour before your meeting.  Also, if time is a factor maybe tell your daughter how much you love her and give her the family medallion in the car while you are bugging the hell out of town, not while the bad guys are incoming.  You know, just thinking out loud here.  Also, they painted every American law enforcement person as kind of cowardly when confronted with a hot chick who threatens their family and life.  It must be a French thing (Megat(r)on is French too) to try to constantly show Americans as incompetent, corrupt, and cowardly.  Seems I can remember a certain European country surrendering pretty damn quick during a big war a few decades ago.  Also, didn’t you get your butts kicked by Mexico on the 5th of May?  I’m just saying.

I really didn’t want to see this movie end up in the black hole region, but try as I might I couldn’t find another star to give them.  Even a couple of the ones I gave them smacked of pity stars.  I like Zoe Saldana a lot and want to see her succeed, and feel gratitude for Luc Besson for the Professional (Taken  wasn’t bad, either) and would like to see him do well, but I can’t really find another good thing about this movie.  It’s not really bad, and you can get some excitement from it.  Some of the action sequences are pretty good, although the best scenes are of Zoe sneaking around Splinter Cell style.  It just doesn’t coalesce into a really good film.  See it if you are really into Zoe and/or Luc Besson, but maybe wait until NetFlix.

Invasion of the midnight black bugbears (why doesn’t spell check call me on that word?)

This movie is one that my friend Dave has been asking me to see and review.  I kind of regret not doing it sooner.  It wasn’t great, but it was a lot better than most of the movies I have reviewed recently (cough cough Conan the Barbarian cough cough) and I enjoyed watching it.  Generally a good experience.

There is one issue I have with this movie, and it is one that has plagued me ever since I started watching Guy Ritchie films: I have a very hard time taking gangsters and gang members with British accents, especially Cockney, seriously or at all threatening.  A Cockney accent makes me feel kind of warm and fuzzy, and having some guy spout out hard core gangster dialog just makes me giggle.  The disparity is like learning that your sweet grandmother is a five star general and listen to her order men to their deaths.  It’s just funny.

I guess the disparity stems in part from having lived around some actual bad ass guys (did I mention I have lived in Oakland for 10 years now?) and seeing them all the time in American movies.  Also, the relative rarity of guns in the UK makes crime over there seem somehow less threatening and more amusing.  I know for sure that this is just a messed up perception on my part, and if I were on the wrong street in South London I would probably get my ass handed to me pretty quick by guys who sound a lot like Benny Hill.  Nevertheless, there it is.

By the way, I do take Irish accents to be pretty serious, but that might be from some of my older family.

Anyway, Attack the Block.  Since it is almost out of theaters and wasn’t in a lot of them in the first place I am going to assume most of you will not see it and feel a little free with spoiler, so you might want to skip this next paragraph if you plan to seek it out.  Anyway, a gang of youthful hooligans mugs a young girl.  During the course of their crime a meteor crashes into a nearby parked car.  It contains a very small (pretty much Gremlin sized) alien who attacks the leader of the hooligans.  They chase it, kill it, and walk around London carrying it like a trophy.  Turns out the little one they killed was a precursor for a swarm of others, all the size of a black bear with midnight black fur (cough cough easy CGI cough cough) and glowing green teeth.  They are after anyone who has had contact with the first alien (there is a reason for this, but I won’t spoil that much).  Alien-esque hijinks ensue.  Guys get killed.  Aliens get killed with a number of improvised weapons.  The mugging victim ends up teamed up with the kids.  Some annoying pre-teens show up and do annoying stuff. (Alien image courtesy of the science fiction t shirt category)

The stars.  Independent film.  One star.  Nick Frost.  One star.  Reasonably believable story.  One star.  The main group of young teenage hooligans rang really true and acted pretty well for young actors, especially the main one, John Boyega.  One star.  Story conclusion was well done and hardly smacked of deus ex machina at all.  The characters worked hard for it.  One star.  The girl was really cute, but they didn’t try to crowbar in any kind of dumb romance to gum up the story (this is why I love independent films).  One star.  The dialog, once you got around understanding all the Cockney, was well done and had some really funny lines.  One star.  Impressive production values for an independent.  One star.  The one comic relief character was actually comic relief without being freaking annoying or changing the tone of the film.  One star.  Total: nine stars.

The black holes.  Alien invaders without any kind of technology.  Basically it was like being invaded by a bunch of bears.  One black hole.  Two little kids kept surfacing and harshing my buzz by being annoying.  One black hole.  After a while the fact that the kids managed to kill aliens over and over again with basically kitchen knives and the like gets less and less believable.  One black hole.  That’s it.  Three black holes.

I have a couple things in the irksome category.  For one, the CGI wasn’t the best I have seen lately.  However, I am not going to ding them on it as it is an independent and I have seen really polished Hollywood CGI delivering total crap to us lately.  Also, throughout most of the movie I couldn’t help but think these invaders could only pull this off in England, as if they landed in the USA our glorious nine guns per ten citizens ratio would have put paid to melee dependent aliens toot sweet.

So a total of six stars.  Nice film, and it’s always good to see a film come out of something other than the Hollywood orifice.  If you can still catch it in a theater I recommend you do so.  If not put in on your NetFlix.

More funny than frightening, but on some levels enjoyable nonetheless.

I never saw the original, and normally would have tried to watch it before hand.  However, after my marathon Harry Potter thing I think I have done enough pre-movie watching for one month.  I will have to just judge this movie on it’s own merits.  My best friend Dave says the original was great.  Actually he says it was Big Trouble in Little China great, which is saying a lot in my book.  I guess I will have to see it soon.  (Pork Chop Express image courtesy of the movie t shirt category)

So Fright Night.  I enjoyed it in a campy way.  I am always appreciative of vampire movies where the vampires are not somehow good and/or sparkle in daylight.  In this movie vampires do what vampires are supposed to do in daylight: burst into flame and die quickly.  Not great, however, and if you really think about it you can be pretty bothered by a lot of the film.  I strongly suspect that once I see the original one I will come to realize that this flick is one of those horrid too slick CGI remakes that are so prevalent right now.

So, the movie.  Charlie (Anton Yelchin, from the new Star Trek and the God-awful Terminator: Salvation) is a high school kid who has recently made the nigh impossible (at least in my experience) transition from uber nerd (apparently he had attended a Farscape convention.  I have done the same, and see no problem with that) to cool kid, and apparently one of the perks of rejecting who you really are on the inside is a super hot girlfriend.  His ex best friend Ed (Chirstopher Mintz-Plasse from Kick Ass and Superbad) is feeling hurt about being dropped like a bad habit and is threatening to reveal some of the cooler (IMO) moments of Charlie’s youth.  He needs Charlie’s help proving that the new neighbor, Jerry, is actually a vampire.

Of course, Jerry actually is a vampire, and whole families are going missing.  Ed gets turned when Charlie leaves him hanging.  Some humorous moments occur as Jerry (Colin Farrell, who wavers for me between kind of cool and really annoying.  In this one he was the former) is super creepy and threatening.  Vampire hunting hijinks ensue.  The action gets very Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque, which makes sense as the writer Marti Noxon actually wrote a bunch of Buffy episodes.  If you have seen even one show then you have more or less seen all the action and story resolution in this film.

By the way, I looked up Marti Noxon in IMDB and was surprised to find out first of all she is a woman, and second of all pretty hot for an older woman.  I have to say I am intrigued by her writing style and assumed intellect.  I’ll add her to the list of women I will never get to meet.

Anyway, stuff blows up.  We get a couple of appearances by the stupidest cops in the history of law enforcement.  David Tennant from Dr. Who shows up as a local “expert” on vampire hunting.  Vampires die.  Humans die.  A happy ending gets pulled out of nowhere.

The stars.  Kind of funny.  One star.  The characters and their dialog was probably the best part of the film.  Two stars.  Decent CGI.  One star.  Some really hot women (although no gratuitous nudity, which I was pretty offended at.  If you are going to get an R rating anyway can you at least throw your horny guy audience a bone here?)  One star.  None of the characters acted in what I thought was a stupid, typical horror movie manner.  One star.  No sparkle or “good” vampires.  One star.  Total: seven stars.

And the black holes.  There was nothing thrilling or frightening during the entirety of this film.  It does not deserved to be called a horror movies.  One black hole.  For a movie that seems to want to reside in the “funny horror” neighborhood of horror films, it really wasn’t all that funny.  A few chuckle-worthy moments, but that’s pretty much it.  One black hole.  The 3D did nothing, and the blood and gore was minimal and obviously fake.  One black hole.  They fell back on the whole Buffy-style “no-one-in-town-ever-notices-the-fact-that-kids-and-entire-families-are-going-missing” thing that was my biggest beef with Buffy (sorry, but if several dozen teenage kids went missing in a town the size of Sunnydale there would be about 1,000 FBI agents parked there).  One black hole.  The cops were dumber than a sack of hammers and failed to talk to the woman in a domestic disturbance call, look into three separate hit and run incidents, or even look into an obvious case of arson (sorry, digging up a gas pipe and setting fire to it is pretty much going to raise a couple of eyebrows when the fire department comes around).  They are seriously written to be non-entities for the duration of the film.  One black hole.  In the movie the main vampire is said to want to turn all his victims and pretty much needs to feed every night.  A little basic math would mean that if he turns one person each night and then they each turn one person by the end of  a full month the entire population of North America would be vampire.  Petty I know, but really two lines of expository dialogue would have cleared this up.  One black hole.  The ending might have been good for an episode of Buffy, but reeked of POOYA syndrome (Pulled Out Of Your Ass) for a movie.  One black hole.  Total: seven black holes.

So a final score of zero stars.  Not really good, and honestly I can’t recommend you spend your hard earned dollars seeing it in a theater.  Also, I very strongly suspect that if I had seen the original Fright Night I would end up giving it another 4-6 black holes.  Just look at the review I did for Conan.  This could be a good brainless NetFlix night.  Not bad, just not that good.

I’m at a trade show for the next two days (viva Las Vegas!) so my next post won’t be until Tuesday night maybe (probably Wednesday).  Have a good start of the week.

Another great classic is reanimated only to be burned by the local villagers (I mean scriptwriters).

You know, being what is generally considered highly intelligent and perceptive is both a blessing and a curse.  Sure, it helps me notice things like smoke coming from under the hood of my car and make the intelligent connection that maybe I should stop before it blows up, but sometimes I know ahead of time when things are going to be horrible, and Conan the Barbarian is the perfect example of that.  When I first saw the trailer I had that slow sinking sensation you get from stuff like swimming in the ocean and seeing a fin angling for you.  It could be a dolphin, but odds are you are about to lose some significant anatomy.

This movie is also great example of being careful what you wish for.  A couple months ago I was bitching about the fact that I couldn’t find a bad movie worthy of my sarcasm, and low and behold, here one is!  Unfortunately it is a remake of one of my all time favorites, so I feel like I am desecrating a corpse.

How did I know this was going to blow?  Well, first of all, some movies just really don’t need to be remade.  Conan the Barbarian circa 1982 was cinematographic awesomeness that holds up even to this day.  Arnold at his best, great action, a compelling story of love and revenge, and a guy who turns into a giant snake.  What more could you ask for?  So they show the trailer for this new turd and immediately I know it is going to suck, just in comparison to what was previously known.  But was it going to suck as a stand alone film?  In other words, if Conan had not been made in 1982, how likely was this to suck by itself?  For insight on that question I turned to friend of all movie reviewers IMDB.  My fears were allayed when I found out they had hired a bunch of people no one had ever heard of: sub par remake director Marcus Nispel (the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003, Friday the 13th 2009, the Very Best of Cher the Video Hits Collection 2004 (WTF???)); writer Thomas Dean Donnelly (Dylan Dog, Dead of (the) Night 2010, which I reviewed and it sucked, A Sound of Thunder 2005 (bad film adaptation of the Butterfly Effect), Sahara 2005, Thoughtcrimes 2003); his writing partner Joshua Oppenheimer, who has all the same credits and my just have been responsible on some level for the creation of the atomic bomb, and a couple other losers including Sean Hood, who wrote for the Crow Wicked Prayers 2005.  With a pedigreed lineup like that there is no way this movie could really suck, right?

It’s not so much as I am disappointed in these less than talented individuals (I mean, look at their track record.  You can’t expect much) as I am bitter at Hollywood for taking another cherished childhood memory and whoring it out for a few quick bucks.  Does a decent directory and a couple of good writers really cost so much that you feel you have to inflict visual pollution on the screens of America?  Hell, go to any film school, find 100 seniors, and tell them all to write a Conan script.  Make it a contest and one of them will come up with something that reads better than this Miles O’Keefe worthy opus.

Anyway, the movie.  How does it suck?  Oh, let me count the ways.  The thing is, with the original Conan (yes I am going to be making a lot of comparisons.  With a film like that you can’t not.  Deal with it), the writers kind of knew the level of acting they were dealing with (i.e. not a lot) and wrote the character and dialog to best suite Arnold’s acting strengths and weaknesses.  There was minimal conversation and they made up for it with great direction and visuals, coming out with something brilliant.  I cite the opening sequence as an example.  Conan’s village is attacked by raiders under a double snake emblem.  Everyone is killed, and Conan gets chained to the Wheel of Pain for fifteen years before being trained as a arena slave in gladiatorial games.  That is pretty much it, but with almost no dialog whatsoever you are told everything about Conan you could possibly need.  Where he is from, what motivates him, how he became so skilled in battle, etc.  In this dog, I knew it was going to hell when Morgan Freeman (I think.  Sure sounds like him, but I couldn’t find a credit) starts the film with a narration about what is motivating the bad guys (some kind of evil mask).  Hey, morons.  This is a film from primitive times.  We don’t need a really complicated motivation for the bad guys to be bad.  Simple rape and pillage should be sufficient.

Anyway, in the new film Conan is ripped from his mothers womb in battle by his father (Ron Perlman, why can’t you pick out a decent script?).  There was a chance for a nice training montage that I, as a fan of Kung Fu movies, would have appreciated it, but they cut it down to show us how Conan was a brutal killer even before being trained.  Good genes, I guess.  Also I guess they paid for a blacksmith set so they had to show a sword being forged.  His village gets overrun by the bad guy (Stephan Lang, and the only performance that didn’t totally suck) who is looking for the last piece of the magical mask that we were just told by Morgan Freeman that was broken up and scattered among the barbarians.  Apparently he wants to use the mask to have his daughter resurrect his dead sorceress wife with the blood of a purebred (not sure what kind of purebred.  Dalmatian, maybe?) so she can help him conquer the world.  See what I mean about overly complicated.

Anyway, Ron Perlman takes a molten steel shower and Conan escapes (what the hell?  No Wheel of Pain?  Lame.).  Morgan cuts in with another expository monologue to avoid all that pesky story development and tells us that Conan is now a great warrior and thief.  Conan is somehow the most civilized barbarian in the history of the world (you know, just not wearing a shirt so you can expose your overdeveloped pectorals does not make you a barbarian) and spends his time freeing slaves and whatnot (remember when Conan was just motivated for loot, and only discovered the bad guys when he broke into their tower to steel anything not nailed down?), with the help of some blatantly rubber boulders a la Star Trek TOS.  I’m not kidding about the civilized barbarian, by the way, his speech and actions are about as far removed from actual barbarians as this movie is from talented writers.

So we find out the bad guy and his daughter (played horribly by Rose McGowen.  Sorry Rose, I think you are hot, but if you are going to play a primitive evil sorceress can you please try to pretend you aren’t a SoCal bimbo?) have the mask, but instead of using the last 20 years to more or less conquer the world they have been looking for their purebred (English Bulldog?).  By coincidence it is a hot young girl (ever notice the chosen one is never a fat male bookkeeper?) who lives in a monastery.  Some brain deadening action occurs.  The monastery has bad stuff happen to it.  Conan rescues the purebred (Beagle?) but then sort of captures her to be used as bait for the bad guy.  More bad action occurs.  Magical hijinks ensues, including the only fight scene that didn’t make me want to pass out when Rose summons some Sandman-esque demons who are actually pretty cool.  Unlimited henchmen, bad and good, are killed by the truckload.  We grind our way to the pretty dumb ending that I and I think no one else in the audience cared about.

The stars.  Sand demons.  One star.  Ron Perlman.  One star.  Jason Momoa, whom I like from Stargate Atlantis.  One star.  Some completely and utterly unnecessary but highly appreciated gratuitous nudity.  One star.  Giant octopus fight.  One star.  I’ll give props for costuming.  One star.  Most of the villains looked pretty cool and had some nice variety.  One star.  Total: seven stars.

Now the black holes.  Honestly, I found it really kind of boring.  I was in serious danger of dozing off, and not just in the acting scenes.  The action was so repetitive and predictable, and I had no connection with Conan whatsoever, not to mention that he doesn’t even get slightly hurt so there was never any tension.  One black hole.  A pale imitation of a great film.  One black hole.  No Wheel of Pain.  One black hole.  No “What is best in life?”  One black hole (What is Best in Life image courtesy of the movie t shirt category).  No Riddle of Steel (they had some dumb Mystery of Steel, but it was lame).  One black hole.  Dialog so bad that Robert DiNiro couldn’t deliver it well (“I live. I love. I slay, and I am content.”-Conan).  Two black holes.  Wooden, mediocre acting almost all around.  Two black holes.  Remember how Conan’s love interest was an accomplished warrior herself?  Not here.  One black hole.  Conan’s thief sidekick falls into the annoying comic relief category (in the original he was pretty cool).  One black hole.  Annoying monologs in place of decent direction and story telling.  One black hole.  Location subtitles for places that don’t really exist.  Are we supposed to know or care?  This isn’t a James Bond film.  One black hole.  Conan the Civilized Barbarian.  One black hole.  The main bad guy had a really stupid double bladed sword.  One black hole.  Is it unreasonable to assume four trained warriors can capture a woman with no weapons training whatsoever without her sticking a knife in the unguarded heart of one of them?  Where does that need to have the girl strike back at least once per fight come from?  I’ve seen it in other films and it always strikes me as pandering.  One black hole.  General bad direction.  One black hole.  Generally bad writing.  One black hole.  Total: eighteen black holes.

Wow.  Eleven black holes.  A film finally got a worse score than Green Lantern from me.  A lot of that is because I am a Conan fan (Conan O’Brien too, for that matter) and see this as some of the most odious crud possible being shoved down our throats in the pursuit of a quick buck, but I have to go with what I know.  And honestly, if you are going to remake a movie or attempt to restart a franchise that give me the absolute right to make all the comparisons I like.  If you didn’t want to be compared to the original you should have called this something like A Barbarian Kills Some Guys.  I would have probably seen that and not really bitched so much.

Anyway, big weekend for movies.  I plan to see Fright Night, and Attack the Block.  If I can stomach it I might force myself to see Spy Kids: All the Time in the World 3D, but that looks pretty painful.  There’s something out called One Day that looks wholesomely romantic, so I might see that later in the week.

Speaking of 3D, I want to call shenanigans on the whole 3D thing.  It did nothing for this movie, to the point that at one time I took my glasses off and honestly didn’t see a lot of problems for like five minutes.  I think the day will come when they sell us on 3D glasses only to show us a 2D film and laugh all the way to the bank.

By the way, my friend Joshua over at theStream.tv just posted a video with Jeff Lewis (Vork, from the Guild) for a game show they do called Stream, Lose, or Draw that is pretty funny.  I am a huge Vork fan, if only bacause I knew about eight guys like him back when I played WOW.

Yes, I liked it.  I’ve pretty much liked the whole series.  I now realize there is no way I could have fairly reviewed it without having seen the rest of them, so I think I took the right path.  I will also say that there was a lot of stuff I didn’t understand, and some stuff that came up in this movie that I probably could have used about five movies ago, so I guess I’m now at the point where I pretty much have to buy and read the books.  Do they all have to look so goofy on the cover?  One thing the Lord of the Rings has always done right is made their covers as dignified and ominous as possible.  I think I would have bought the books years ago if they hadn’t all featured a skinny, bespectacled kid who has a goofy smile on his face.

By the way, after my rant about carrying a ton of extra wands and using a wand in both fists my best friend Dave invented the Gatling wand, so I want to give him props for that.  I think it’s brilliant.

I am going to keep my questions down to the ones I feel won’t spoil the plot at all, in case someone like me has not seen it yet or read the books.  I will also keep the story synapses to a minimum.  Basically Harry and his friends are still on the horcrux Easter Egg hunt, and it leads them to Hogwarts, where the imprison the entirety of Slytheryn (finally) and then are besieged by Death Eaters.  Cool stone statues come to life to defend.  Stuff gets blown up.  People gets killed.  Everyone seems to have forgotten where they hid their brooms again.  Voldemort rains unholy nostril-faced hell on pretty much everyone.  Two of my three predictions pretty much came true.

The stars.  Great ending to a pretty awesome story.  Two stars.  Great special effects and CGI.  One star.  I’ve gotten so used to all the characters that none of them bug me, and they have all matured nicely as pretty good actors, especially Daniel Radcliffe.  One star.  The story, in a very real way, was extremely satisfying.  One star.  They didn’t waste any time with a recap of Part I at the start of the film.  It was a huge F you to anyone who didn’t see the first one, but really who is that dumb?  Besides almost me.  One star.  Snape had a really cool, integral part that actually gave him a lot of depth.  One star.  Despite my fears, Draco Malfoy manage to not end the movie dead or in a horrible situation.  One star.  The plot was fast paced and made a lot or sense.  One star.  Ron and Hermione finally kiss.  One star.  They didn’t try to get a softer movie rating by holding off on the massive carnage.  One star.  Two more bonus stars for an all around great movie experience.  Total: thirteen stars.

Now the black holes.  I am going to give one for all the stuff that I would have known had I read the book but they couldn’t stuff into the movie for illiterate morons.  I know this would be almost impossible to pull off in a less than six hour movie, and I don’t hold it against the film, but I still see it as somewhat of a failure.  One black hole.  Voldemort seems to play pretty fast and loose with his last remaining horcrux.  One black hole.  Dumbledore resurfaces to ruin all the respect he gained from me in the last couple films in order to prove he was exactly the manipulative, heartless bastard I though he was in the first few movies.  One black hole.  A couple of the deaths of characters I liked kind of really harshed my buzz, especially Ron’s brother.  One black hole.  Total:  four black holes.

So a grand total of nine stars, an excellent score for an excellent series.  I feel pretty good about this.  However, it would not be one of my Harry Potter reviews if I did not come up with more dumb questions to ask.

Back on wands.  I now understand a bit more of wand lore, thanks to one scene where a wand loremaster kind of lays out some details, but I am still intrigued by the idea of size and shape.  Could you make your want the size and shape of a baseball bat?  Then, if you are in a duel and your opponent is kind of kicking your ass but you are up close you could give him or her a magical concussion.  What if you made your wand into a broom stick?  Then you could fly around and basically dive bomb people.  What if you made it into the shape of a boomerang?  Then, if someone disarmed you it could come back.  For that matter, could you just make a wand the size and shape of a shotgun stock?  And then just maybe mount a shotgun to it?  That way, just as you are doing one of those different colored firehose duels, with minimal effort you send a load of buckshot at him.  Sure, most if it would probably get vaporized in the conflagration, but if a couple pellets managed to hit Voldemort in the shin that would be a pretty huge distraction.   (Shotgun image courtesy of the video game t shirt category).

There is a scene in the movie where a bridge gets blown up with explosives, along with a bunch of bad guys.  That kind of implies that explosives have an effect on wizards.  Why, then, instead of stone guys armed with medieval weapons does Hogwarts not just have a couple of self propelled artillery pieces?  The part where the Death Eaters are all together on a hill shooting at Hogwarts could have gone pretty bad for them if someone had called in an airstrike.  I don’t know if magic really has to mean you can’t occasionally throw in some modern technology, especially if your life is in danger.

Is Snape not still obligated to protect Draco Malfoy due to his unbreakable oath?  He seems to take a pretty lax position with regards to that, letting Draco run around and get almost burned to death.  If I were obligated to protect some kid on pain of my own death I’d have him locked up in an oubliette with crate of canned food and a Game Boy until the fireworks were over.

Where did the giants and spiders come from?  Did they just see the action brewing and come along for the ride?  Does Voldemort have an account with Rent-a-Monster, but his credit limit isn’t enough to get dragons so he just ordered the two he could afford?  For that matter Hogwarts can afford to hire dragons, as they did for the Tri Wiz competition.  I think I’d have a few of those locked up downstairs in case a huge army of Death Eaters, spiders, and giants happened to come calling.

So every single kid at Hogwarts is some kind of super brave hero?  Sure, Slytheryn is evil and all got locked up while Gryffindor is supposed to be the brave ones, but there wasn’t a single Hufflepuff who was like “Hey, I’m just here to get an education.  I don’t want to get mixed in this dark master crap.”?  If an army of unimaginable evil had laid siege to my high school and I had access to a flying broom I would have bugged out so fast your eyes would spin, and I probably would have set up on a hill nearby with popcorn to watch the show.   (Actually, if an army of unimaginable evil had had destructive intentions towards my high school I probably would have gone out the them with a bunch of Cliff Bars, in case they were hungry.  However, we are not here to discuss my high school experience).

That’s pretty much it for now. I have to run.  Thanks for sticking with me on my Harry Potter marathon.  It has been a blast.  New movies this weekend.  Talk to you soon.

Yes, I’ve seen all that can be seen via DvD and am now poised to see the very last one in a theater tomorrow night.  I say poised but in truth I am excited.  In spite of my original belief that Harry Potter was a kiddish version of the Lord of the Rings it has really engaged me and held my attention.  I honestly think having watched them all back to back like this I might have even gotten more out of them than most people did, and I am ready to see the final one tomorrow.  That will be a full on review, with the whole stars and black holes thing, but this one will be the usual abbreviated version with annoying questions.

I have kind of pondered why I am not comfortable doing the whole review thing for these.  It’s not like stars and black holes take any more effort to write up than coming up with these questions.  It really comes down to a few things.  First off, I don’t sit on my couch and watch DvDs with 100% of my attention.  I am usually working on my new secret army (just got the second full rank of the first unit done.  Very laborious), or folding my laundry, or whatever.  Therefore I could be easily off on some of my assessments and impressions.  Also, these movies are in the past and I want to treat them differently.  I don’t think any of you gain anything by having me recount the story and then pick it apart in painful detail.  Finally, I have noticed a trend where when I start doing black holes I can act like a broken fire hose, spraying black holes in quantity and volume that I originally didn’t intend.  Often times this can really look like I hated the film, and the fact is I am quite enjoying these.  Also, there are enough psychotic Harry Potter fans out there to actually make me concerned for my safety should I get too harsh on it.

However, that does not prevent me from coming up with more annoying questions.  The good news is since the Deathly Hallows does not feature any Qudditch I have not come up with any sports related questions.  However, my first questions directly related to Voldemort.

Here it is.  Voldemort has created seven horcruxes in which he has hidden fragments of his soul.  As long as even one of them is intact he essentially cannot be killed.  Why, then, does he leave them lying around for anyone to come across?  If I had seven horcruxes the first one I would embed in a six foot block of concrete and then drop into the Marianas Trench.  The second I would stick inside the Japanese nuclear reactor that went bad.  The third I would magically transport to the dark side of Pluto.  Actually, since they can only be destroyed by very specific means I think I would send the fourth into the sun and the fifth into a black hole.  The sixth I would embed in my body, probably where my appendix used to be.  The seventh I would put in a relatively easy place to find, but surround it with as many deadly booby traps as possible.  I’m not talking trap doors and rolling stone balls, either.  Claymores.  Nice way to thin out the Voldemort Killing Committee.  The one thing I most definitely would not do is give one to a crusty lady with terrible fashion sense who has already been bested by my worst enemy once to wear around the Ministry for any fool to grab.

Speaking of the Hot Pink Nightmare, Dolores Umbridge, didn’t she get eaten by centaurs a couple movies back?  How did she resurface?

I have a question about the Death Eater recruitment program, and it kind of ties in with a previous question I asked about the economy of the Harry Potter world.  What, exactly, does Voldemort promise someone like Snape to join him?  I can understand a crazy nutjob like Bellatrix Lestrange doing it just for the joy of causing mayhem, but Snape is a well thought out, cautious, learned man.  What could possibly induce him to not only risk his life and career, but also to betray his friends and colleges, as well as make an death binding oath to protect what is effectively just another annoying Hogwarts student?  All the power in the world?  Sorry, that is reserved for Voldemort.  Money?  A hot car?  A makeover reality TV show?  Honestly, what is it?  It doesn’t seem like anyone in this world is hurting for money and can conjure food at will, so what do you offer a man who has access to everything?  I can understand once Voldemort more or less takes over everything being a Death Eater is the cool thing to do and all the wizards are gung ho to join, but Snape seems to have been involved for a long time.  What was the first carrot Voldemort ever held out?

As an aside, I do have to give props to the directors for casting Helen Bonhome Carter as Lestrange.  If you are ever casting a crazy bitch with possible occult powers you really can’t find anyone even slightly better.  I loved her in Fight Club, but she seems to have been really stereotyped in the roles she is given (Paper Street Soap Co (from Fight Club) courtesy of the movie t shirt category).

I have a question regarding the title of this movie.  When I first heard the Deathly Hallows I assumed the Deadly Hollows referred to a serious of inimical geographic locations.  You know, like Sleepy Hollow, only deadlier.  I find during the course of this movie that the Deadly Hollows actually refers to three items that are presumably horcruxes.  I have taken the liberty of looking up both hollow and hollows in a couple different dictionaries and, while there are a number of definitions, none of them in any way relate to any kind of magic item or fetish.  Is the J.K. Rowlings just screwing with the English language to make for a better sounding book?  I admit Harry Potter and the Deadly Objects really doesn’t have the same oomph the hollows gives, but it just seems a little self serving.

Note-I just found out I am an idiot.  The title is Deathly Hallows, not Deadly Hollows.  Thanks to all my Harry Potter fan friends for not making me avoid that huge mistake.  I haven’t been this embarrassed since an unfortunate incident in the first grade I don’t want to get into.

I am glad to see that no force on Earth or Heaven can prevent J.K. Rowlings from employing deus ex machina yet again.  Does it not strike anyone on the planet that the fact that Luna Lovegood’s father just happens to be wearing a pendant that symbolizes the exact three things Harry has to find has to be the biggest coincidence of all time?  Or even that Harry noticed it?  Every character in this movie is wearing an occult symbol as a pendant.  But seriously, Xenophilius Lovegood is such a fan of a children’s story that he wears a pendant from it?  That is like me wearing a pendant symbolizing Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

By the way, did I miss something?  How did Harry lose his tracking chip?

Finally, if both Harry and Hermione both know that the pendant horcrux is screwing with Ron’s attitude and perceptions, and both understand that within a few hours of taking it off he will be back to normal, why did they bug out and leave him with no means of finding them after he calmed down?  My dad used to take us camping once in a while and was a total jerk.  I would get pissed off and run off into the woods to throw rocks at stuff.  This is like if he packed up the car and left me on my own hundreds of miles away, except for the fact that Ron actually likes Harry and Hermione.  I’m glad to see that Ron and Hermione’s romance is still going, but at some point one of them has to say something.  I am going to be really, really upset of one of them gets killed in the next movie and leaves the other one miserable.

That’s it for questions.  I am going to see Part II tomorrow night, I think.  I am going to take a moment to make myself feel better and make a few predictions, based on what I know of J.K. Rowlings writing style.  Let’s see if I am half as smart as I like to think.  These predictions are based on no prior knowledge whatsoever:

Harry Potter himself is the final horcrux.  Severus Snape will sacrifice himself in the end to stop Voldemort.  There will be no non-white characters in the film at all.

That’s it.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  Have a good one.

Film of Boredom

Look, given what I have read by other, more accomplished film critics about this movie my review is going to make me look like a knuckle dragging, low brow inbred white trash moron who can only be entertained by big explosions and bare breasts on the screen.  That may well be the case, but the fact is I studied art in college, and took a lot of film and video classes.  I know a few things about film theory.  I love French surrealist films.  Film symbolism and subtle nuance is rarely lost on me.  A good independent film is a joy for me, and when I go into one that I know doesn’t conform to the Hollywood model I really try to reset my perception to look for intentions and symbolism I might not see in a movie about a super hero.

As you might have gathered from this so far, Tree of Life was not what I expected, and that’s because what I expected at some point during the movie was SOMETHING.  Nothing happens during the entirety of the film.  This film as like if you spliced some of the more acid induced elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey with someone’s home movies.  There is no plot.  There is no protagonist.  There is no point.  You spend two and half hours (that felt like six hours) alternating between asking “What the frak?” and praying for something, anything to happen.  Hell, by the end of it I would have been happy to have had someone pull the fire alarm in the theater.  (What the frak image courtesy of the tv show t shirt category).

You know, I realized about 2/3rds of the way through this opus that, if, while in school I had come across 1,000 hours of someone’s home videos and a $2,000,000 CGI effects budget this is probably the the video art project I would have come up with, for which I would have deservedly gotten a B-.  For me it screams self indulgent vanity piece, which is weird because most directors do a vanity piece after they do several dozen decent movies, not four, most of which no one has ever seen (the Thin Red Line being the only one of his films I had seen previously and honestly kind of liked it).

I was so perplexed by this that I actually listened to a couple interviews with the actors in the film and found out that the director, Terry Malick, didn’t really have a script or dialog so much as he would give the actors lines as they filmed it, and allowed them to improvise as they saw fit.  This actually makes a lot of sense.  There is very little actual dialog in the film and what there is seems really unpolished.  Instead we get to see a ton of slow panning shots of Brad Pitt’s face shot from under his chin, a lot of Stand By Me style scenes of young boys running around playing and breaking stuff, a lot of mommy bonding with babies and boys while dad is more or less abusing, and a lot of Evil Captain Kirk shot up from the ground two feet in front of him stumbling around as Sean Penn has a mental breakdown.  I have said several times that this movie is like watching home movies, and that appears to be exactly how it was shot.

I won’t say it didn’t elicit emotion, as long as depression, boredom, and confusion are emotions.  The movie starts off with the parents dealing with the death of a son, and then starts flashing back all over the place.  The thing is, home movies can be fun and whimsical, kind of like watching the Wonder Years, but the fact that we start off knowing that one of the three boys is destined to die casts a terrible pall over every scene that follows, and you spend the entire movie wondering which of them it is going to be.  Can there be anything more depressing than watching a loving mother bonding with her infant and toddler sons, knowing that in a few years one of them will be tragically killed in some ill defined manner?  Of course by the end of the film I was praying for any of the characters to die, if only to break up the monotony.

Sigh.  The story, for lack of a better term.  The film starts off with Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain playing Mr. and Mrs. O’Brian, a typical 1950′s couple who receive the horrible news that one of their three boys has been killed.  Since the news is delivered via telegram I can only assume it was in Korea or Vietnam.  We get to sit through some disjointed funeral and dealing with death scenes, which for Mr. O’Brian seems to involve watering his lawn.  There are some early references to Job and some highly pretentious voice over passages that all seem to be very Bible related, so I think there was something about the whole “why do bad things happen to good people?” debate in this.  Anyway, we are treated to a red lava lamp (that recurs several times) that I think is supposed to represent the creator and suddenly are whipped back to the beginning of time and the creation of the universe.  At this point I really wasn’t sure what was going on and had heard someone describe this film as science fiction, so my interest perked in the  hope we were actually on a another planet and the dead son was going to be reincarnated as an alien, but sadly this was not to be the case.  Instead we were treated to a long zero purpose montage of the creation of our planet from a flaming ball of lava to single celled organism, evolving into fish and eventually into the dinosaurs on the planet.  I am not kidding.  Basically we got to watch discovery channel for 20 minutes.

I said the dinosaur sequence was a montage, but honestly the entire film is a montage.  It is a long (long, long) string of disconnected scenes mashed together with no attempt to have any scenes connect in any way, or for the matter have even a few of the scenes have any plot points or story significance.  I doubt there is much dead footage on the cutting room floor, as Terry pretty much shoved in any scene where they didn’t accidentally shoot the boom mike.  Anyway, flash forward a few hundred million years and it’s the 50′s in Waco, Texas.  The O’Brians are starting their family and have three sons, who rapidly grow up to late pre-teens and pretty much stay there for the rest of the film.  You occasionally flash forward even more to modern New York where Sean Penn plays some kind of architect or business owner.  He is one of the sons grown up and apparently haunted by the death of his brother, so every time you start to feel even a little warm and fuzzy watching idyllic 1950′s you get a nice reminder  of the impending death of one of the three precocious kids.  Also, at one point he starts having acid trips and is somehow in his suit out in the desert.  The scenes jump around purposelessly.  Sometimes it is Brad Pitt as Wally Cleaver, being a great dad.  Sometimes it is him being my dad, authoritarian and borderline abusive.  Sometimes it is the boys playing, then fighting, then wrecking stuff, then getting into trouble.  The thing is every time you think one of these scenes is going to develop into something, it doesn’t.  There is a scene where Jack, the oldest boy, seems to have a crush on a girl from school and follows her after school.  OMG is something interesting going to happen?  No, lets cut to another scene of the boys chasing a frog around and never see the girl again.  Jack hates his father in a classic Oedipal complex (I’d like to give the movie some credit for delivering that concept in a subtle manner, but at one point the kid pretty much shouts out that he hates his dad and that his mother only loves him).  You see a scene where Mr. O’Brian is working under a car with just a flimsy jack holding it up.  The kid is tempted to release the jack, possibly killing his own father.  Wow, could this actually get interesting?  No, lets show the kid running off and hitting a tree with a stick.

This goes on and on and on.  There is a lot of weird crap thrown in too, like a repeating scene of young Jack being inside the house that is flooded and swimming out, and a recurring scene of underwater grass waving.  Not sure what that was about.  Eventually Sean Penn is in a scene of a bunch of people on a beach, including his dead brother and (possibly dead) mother.  I guess it is supposed to be the reuniting of the dead in heaven?  I spent the last hour or so praying for the credits to start rolling and then, with no apparently real conclusion or purpose, they do.

The stars.  Brad Pitt.  One star.  Sean Penn.  One star.  Authentic 1950′s stuff.  One star.  Reasonably accurate portrayal of what young boys do when left to their own devices.  One star.  Some very cool old cars.  One star.  I’d like to give the acting a star, but really I can’t say that is so as none of the dialog scenes actually extend past two or three lines.  The director could have easily just taken the top 1% of the scenes they filmed and dumped the rest to make more room for dinosaurs.  I will refrain.  The film and camera work were actually pretty good.  One star.  Total: six stars.

Now the black holes.  I have to give a couple for the time I spent in the film asking “What the hell is going on?”  Two black holes.  Bored.  Bored bored bored bored bored.  Three black holes.  No real plot.  Two black holes.  They kept flashing back to the acid trip lava lamp creator of the universe.  One black hole.  No real dialog.  One black hole.  No protagonist.  One black hole.  Disjointed editing.  On black hole.  Pacing from hell.  One black hole.  The actual points I think was trying to be made about either the creation of life, man’s insignificance in the universe, or the injustice of bad things happening to good people were all actually pretty prosaic, not to mention poorly delivered.  One black hole.  Purposeless journey to the Land of the Lost.  One black hole.  Total: fourteen black holes.

A less than grand total of eight black holes from me.  Why, then, the disparity between this review and so many others?  You see, I think this is a prime case of the Emporor’s New Clothes syndrome.  This film won the prestigious Cannes’ Palme d’Or award.  Cannes’ Film Festival is held in such high regard that no one who has a serious career in movie reviewing can risk going against the consensus of the film intellectual elite.  Thus, every critic must say something good about it.  Fortunately for you readers I have no serious film reviewing career and can say what I really feel, which is that this film was a steaming pile of pretentious crap.  I don’t know.  Maybe I am a moron and am missing something beuatiful and deep, but I can only review films based on my actual film viewing experience, and that experience was that at some point during the film I was wondering if the green Exit signs in the theater had actual batteries in them that needed replacing or if they used rechargeable ones they just kept charged up from the power grid.  I guess on some level I sort of get what Mr. Malick was going for, and will say he managed to nail the atmosphere brilliantly, but overall I feel like I just watch two hours of random videos off YouTube.