So I've been watching alot of crap movies lately. Movies that I hope will be good, but never end up being worth a damn. But holy shit, found one that I expected to be terrible but was surprisingly good, and never got much attention when it came out. "It's a boy/girl thing" is a movie about opposite individuals being forced to overcome their differences to become better people and eventually fall in love.
So here's the part that probably scared people away from the theaters: The premise of the movie is that the smartest girl in school "Nell" and the Jock star-quarterback "Woody" are on a field trip to a museum. Woody is misbehaving with his buddy and is forced to partner up with Nell, who is mostly a social outcast. They get into an argument in front of an ancient Aztec statue of the god of trickery. The next morning when they wake up Nell is in Woody's body and Vice-versa.
Ok, so yea, terrible premise, but the rest of the movie is really startlingly good. Like I could not believe how good. The two lead actors are no-names, and are amazing at portraying the opposite gender. The girl had the broad male mannerisms down, she sat like a guy, her facial expressions were very much intune with the male character, it was amazing. The guy did a much more subtle performance, as he changed from a standard "outgoing jock dude" into a insecure, feminine, awkward guy. Even the male actor's vocal intonations changed with the swap. It was quite impressive. So basically, you have a movie about two actors who play themselves and eachother. Seen it done with two of the same gender successfully, this was the first successful cross-gender movie switch I've seen.
The other characters were much less notable, but each had their own personal moment of glory where their character shown through.
Even with the unique performance aside, this is a perfect feel-good movie. Everything happens the way you want it to happen, even if you didn't know you wanted it to happen that way. You know going in that Nell and Woody must get together at some point, but I was honestly expecting some cross-gendered awkward makeout sessions. I was terrified that the writers would be unable to resist this trap, but resist they did, and the results were much better than expected.
I can't imagine most movie fanatics liking this movie, it's too simple, there aren't any big surprises in the plot, but if you just like to sit down and enjoy a movie, I recommend this one. It delivers what you want and doesn't try to pretend to be a more important movie than it is.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
An old and a new.
Movie review time. Today you get a twofer.
A new movie "The graduates"
and an old movie "The planet of the apes" (2001 version)
The graduates is a movie that can't decide what it wants to be. For part of the movie it is a celebration of the reckless teenage years very similar to American Pie, for the other half of the movie it turns into a needlessly preachy "You gotta focus ahead, grow up, and stop being so immature" movie. The movie follows a group of male friends, one of whom you discover is gay. Surprisingly it's not THE ONE WHO IS FREAKING OBVIOUSLY GAY! moving on, The four guys are stereotypical to the 9th degree. There is the main character Ben, who is obsessed with the slutty girl who has a boyfriend and ignores his female best friend who is in love with him. His friends are: the stereotypical mouthy italian guy, the cool quiet guy, and the socially awkward guy with a girlfriend.
You of course assume that the cool quiet guy is the gay one for obvious reasons, he defends homosexuality multiple times, dresses well, and ignores all the women in the cast.
But no, it's the awkward guy with the girlfriend. Turns out the reason he hasn't slept with her is that he's secretly gay. wooooo, what a twist. He then tries hitting on the cool quiet guy, who shuts him down and tells him to go back into the closet.
Ben, our protagonist, eventually hooks up with the slutty girl, who is by far the most irritating female character ever written. Every scene that she was in made me want to hurl bricks at the screen. Her boyfriend shows up, he's an uber douche, and we're finally rid of her. Her leaving is the greatest moment in the entire film. He then realizes that he's been treating his female best friend very poorly and spends a crazed night trying to apologize to her. He doesn't end up with her, in fact, the closing scene of the movie is them walking down the beach and discussing how good of friends they are and how they don't want to ruin their friendship by dating.
But the movie isn't even about those people, it's actually about Ben's older brother, who is a 29 year old layabout who has been attending highschool events ever since he left highschool. He runs into someone he graduated with and he decided that it's time for him to move on with his life, get a job, and settle down with a family. The friend in question of course has the opposite reaction, seeing the brother, he decides to be a douchebag, ignore his wife and kids, take up smoking, heavy drinking, and mushrooms. He then takes over the brother's post of "creepy old-guy douchebag at the highschool parties".
So yea, interesting film, would not recommend it.
Planet of the apes.
Skip it. Watch the original, it atleast makes some sort of sense.
The 2001 version features Marky mark as a near-future astronaut on a star-trek style exploration mission with a bunch of apes. They receive a distress call, so they send an Ape in a space ship. the ape disappears so mark goes to investigate, followed later by his mothership. He ends up on a world run by apes with humans as slaves. The apes have somehow developed into human-ish creatures with a number of strange quirks:
1. They have language and culture, and civilization, yet still maintain their feral mannerisms.
2. They are afraid of water, for no goddamn reason.
3. They still have opposable toes, yet they wear shoes.
It's eventually revealed that the spaceships traveled through time and arrived in reverse order. the mothership arrived first, bringing humans and apes to the world (Yet somehow apes managed to evolve drastically and humans remained exactly the same). Mark arrives a few thousand years later, after everyone he knows is dead, and the ape they sent out first arrives a week after mark.
None of this makes any sense.
Furthermore, the apes while clearly non-language based and non-cultural prior to the crash, somehow have extremely detailed records of the crash and the human population at that time. Oh, and according to the dialogue all of the humans were wiped out, yet we can clearly see them all over the goddamn place.
Then we have the time travel problems.
1. The planet is revealed to be the earth, but that would mean that all human and ape life on earth had been created in this infinite paradox, and have effectively created themselves out of thin air.
2. The dialogue however clearly disproves the paradox when it is revealed that Mark was the one who sent off the distress signal that he received earlier in the movie. This gets rid of one paradox by creating another. How could he send a message to himself that is entirely reliant on a bizarre series of improbable events that would have never happened if he had not received said message? So not only have both species created themselves out of thin air, but the entire catalyst for the events of the movie were pulled from the ether aswell.
This brings us the problem of is history solid or fluid? if it's fluid then he couldn't have possibly sent the message because he hadn't yet traveled through time to send it. in this scenario history can be changed, but cannot move ahead of itself.
If history is solid, then him sending the distress signal is a set event in time, cannot be changed. However, if that were true then the reveal at the end of the movie makes no sense, nor does the rest of the movie. If time cannot be changed than either he's always been living amongst sentient apes (in which case the end makes sense but the beginning doesn't) or they died off well before his time (in which case the beginning makes sense but the end doesn't).
The time traveling in the original movie made far more sense. He discovers that he had traveled forward in time, not to another planet, so when he sees the statue of liberty it proves that he is still on earth, but his race has long since died off, and the apes gained sentience in the meantime.
So yea, if you know anything about temporal mechanics, the remake will make you very, very angry.
The cast (excluding mark) was actually pretty good in the film, but the concept for the film was just too awful to be salvaged.
Final thought: avoid this movie, much like "Lost in space" it's pretty and has pretty girls in it, but watching the film will make you stupider.
A new movie "The graduates"
and an old movie "The planet of the apes" (2001 version)
The graduates is a movie that can't decide what it wants to be. For part of the movie it is a celebration of the reckless teenage years very similar to American Pie, for the other half of the movie it turns into a needlessly preachy "You gotta focus ahead, grow up, and stop being so immature" movie. The movie follows a group of male friends, one of whom you discover is gay. Surprisingly it's not THE ONE WHO IS FREAKING OBVIOUSLY GAY! moving on, The four guys are stereotypical to the 9th degree. There is the main character Ben, who is obsessed with the slutty girl who has a boyfriend and ignores his female best friend who is in love with him. His friends are: the stereotypical mouthy italian guy, the cool quiet guy, and the socially awkward guy with a girlfriend.
You of course assume that the cool quiet guy is the gay one for obvious reasons, he defends homosexuality multiple times, dresses well, and ignores all the women in the cast.
But no, it's the awkward guy with the girlfriend. Turns out the reason he hasn't slept with her is that he's secretly gay. wooooo, what a twist. He then tries hitting on the cool quiet guy, who shuts him down and tells him to go back into the closet.
Ben, our protagonist, eventually hooks up with the slutty girl, who is by far the most irritating female character ever written. Every scene that she was in made me want to hurl bricks at the screen. Her boyfriend shows up, he's an uber douche, and we're finally rid of her. Her leaving is the greatest moment in the entire film. He then realizes that he's been treating his female best friend very poorly and spends a crazed night trying to apologize to her. He doesn't end up with her, in fact, the closing scene of the movie is them walking down the beach and discussing how good of friends they are and how they don't want to ruin their friendship by dating.
But the movie isn't even about those people, it's actually about Ben's older brother, who is a 29 year old layabout who has been attending highschool events ever since he left highschool. He runs into someone he graduated with and he decided that it's time for him to move on with his life, get a job, and settle down with a family. The friend in question of course has the opposite reaction, seeing the brother, he decides to be a douchebag, ignore his wife and kids, take up smoking, heavy drinking, and mushrooms. He then takes over the brother's post of "creepy old-guy douchebag at the highschool parties".
So yea, interesting film, would not recommend it.
Planet of the apes.
Skip it. Watch the original, it atleast makes some sort of sense.
The 2001 version features Marky mark as a near-future astronaut on a star-trek style exploration mission with a bunch of apes. They receive a distress call, so they send an Ape in a space ship. the ape disappears so mark goes to investigate, followed later by his mothership. He ends up on a world run by apes with humans as slaves. The apes have somehow developed into human-ish creatures with a number of strange quirks:
1. They have language and culture, and civilization, yet still maintain their feral mannerisms.
2. They are afraid of water, for no goddamn reason.
3. They still have opposable toes, yet they wear shoes.
It's eventually revealed that the spaceships traveled through time and arrived in reverse order. the mothership arrived first, bringing humans and apes to the world (Yet somehow apes managed to evolve drastically and humans remained exactly the same). Mark arrives a few thousand years later, after everyone he knows is dead, and the ape they sent out first arrives a week after mark.
None of this makes any sense.
Furthermore, the apes while clearly non-language based and non-cultural prior to the crash, somehow have extremely detailed records of the crash and the human population at that time. Oh, and according to the dialogue all of the humans were wiped out, yet we can clearly see them all over the goddamn place.
Then we have the time travel problems.
1. The planet is revealed to be the earth, but that would mean that all human and ape life on earth had been created in this infinite paradox, and have effectively created themselves out of thin air.
2. The dialogue however clearly disproves the paradox when it is revealed that Mark was the one who sent off the distress signal that he received earlier in the movie. This gets rid of one paradox by creating another. How could he send a message to himself that is entirely reliant on a bizarre series of improbable events that would have never happened if he had not received said message? So not only have both species created themselves out of thin air, but the entire catalyst for the events of the movie were pulled from the ether aswell.
This brings us the problem of is history solid or fluid? if it's fluid then he couldn't have possibly sent the message because he hadn't yet traveled through time to send it. in this scenario history can be changed, but cannot move ahead of itself.
If history is solid, then him sending the distress signal is a set event in time, cannot be changed. However, if that were true then the reveal at the end of the movie makes no sense, nor does the rest of the movie. If time cannot be changed than either he's always been living amongst sentient apes (in which case the end makes sense but the beginning doesn't) or they died off well before his time (in which case the beginning makes sense but the end doesn't).
The time traveling in the original movie made far more sense. He discovers that he had traveled forward in time, not to another planet, so when he sees the statue of liberty it proves that he is still on earth, but his race has long since died off, and the apes gained sentience in the meantime.
So yea, if you know anything about temporal mechanics, the remake will make you very, very angry.
The cast (excluding mark) was actually pretty good in the film, but the concept for the film was just too awful to be salvaged.
Final thought: avoid this movie, much like "Lost in space" it's pretty and has pretty girls in it, but watching the film will make you stupider.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Geek-chic
No movie reviews this time, but expect some soon. This time a real topic. The nature of Advertising and "Cool-hunting"
For the last decade or so advertisers have been struggling to stay ahead of the trends, finding and exploiting new trends in their infancy before they have a chance to hit the mainstream on their own.
Let's be honest here, we all know the definition of "Cool". Cool is "What I have but you haven't gotten yet".
By this definition these advertisers have succeeded in keeping themselves "Cool" by all terms. There are of course the regular hit-and-miss campaigns where they get the tip that something is going to be fashionable, but ends up not being. But these can be discounted as a factor of the volume of campaigns in action at any given point.
The major problem that advertisers face is that while there is the percentage of the market that enjoys being spoon-fed new trends as they come in, that is not the entirety of the market. These days it's not even the majority of the market.
The real target audience that they need to be focusing on are the disenfrachised. Those people who have been permanently labeled as "uncool", the geeks.
These people have no interest in designer jeans or top of the line sunglasses. They have their own interests, and being "Cool" isn't one of them.
This audience is one of focused attention, they very often have a couple hobbies that they spend alot of their time on, but are otherwise your normal every-day wage-slaves. These hobbies serve as their sanctuary from the real world. Many of them get into RPG's of one kind or another, a literal escape from reality as they stop portraying themselves and portray someone else.
To get this audience the advertiser needs to accomplish two things:
1. He must become the geek. This market is very good at smelling phonies, If you've never played dungeons and dragons, you have no chance of marketing your product to them. They might buy it anyways for reasons of neccessity or convience, but they won't seek out your brand of sunglasses just because you claim to be in their hobby. You have to prove it to them.
2. He must accept the geek. This market tends to shy away from standing up for their hobby in the real world. While they don't expect to be cool, they don't want further social rejection. To gain their support, you need to support them. Be willing to alienate your "Cool-seeking" audience for the approval of the geeks. You can't expect to gain both audiences, you have to pick and choose.
This is not even really theory at this point, it's proven fact. A number of people have managed to gain quite a following through this method. Two notable examples are Felicia Day and Joss Whedon. Day has taken the MMORPG crowd and turned them into her own personal cult by casting off her standard Hollywood actor persona and accepting her videogame loving persona. It's not even clear if she is even an active videogame player, I know she plays Dungeons and Dragons once a week (Her twitter tells me so), but no hard evidence has been displayed that she is an active videogame player. Because she doesn't need to be. She's proven that she's atleast knowledgable about the subject, and has embraced it fully. And so, her fans have embraced her and anything she wants to sell us.
Joss Whedon is an amazing example. He doesn't need to divulge too much personal information about himself, his writing speaks for itself. It shows that he is into conspiracy theories, Sci-fi, westerns, vampires, werewolves, demons, etc. Even musicals are represented in his work. Whedon's shows are like a mecca for those who love that genre, so while he might not have his hands on the entirety of the audience, the audience he does have is intensely devoted.
The most amusing thing about this whole phenom is that advertisers are not sure what to do about this. For decades they have been trying to sell us an image of what they think we want to be. Now we have an audience who already knows who they want to be, they just need people to sell them things that they want to have. Some marketing for this audience would be simple to write. Want to sell more Pepsi? Show 20-something people playing whatever the latest videogame is and drinking Pepsi while they play. Others would be much more difficult. It'd be hard to convince this audience to buy a Gucci purse for a ridiculous price. However, offer them a Gucci gaming bag for a more reasonable price and they're in. You might have to compete with the $15 target bag that suits their needs just aswell. You can't sell them something that they can get just as good, for cheaper.
For the last decade or so advertisers have been struggling to stay ahead of the trends, finding and exploiting new trends in their infancy before they have a chance to hit the mainstream on their own.
Let's be honest here, we all know the definition of "Cool". Cool is "What I have but you haven't gotten yet".
By this definition these advertisers have succeeded in keeping themselves "Cool" by all terms. There are of course the regular hit-and-miss campaigns where they get the tip that something is going to be fashionable, but ends up not being. But these can be discounted as a factor of the volume of campaigns in action at any given point.
The major problem that advertisers face is that while there is the percentage of the market that enjoys being spoon-fed new trends as they come in, that is not the entirety of the market. These days it's not even the majority of the market.
The real target audience that they need to be focusing on are the disenfrachised. Those people who have been permanently labeled as "uncool", the geeks.
These people have no interest in designer jeans or top of the line sunglasses. They have their own interests, and being "Cool" isn't one of them.
This audience is one of focused attention, they very often have a couple hobbies that they spend alot of their time on, but are otherwise your normal every-day wage-slaves. These hobbies serve as their sanctuary from the real world. Many of them get into RPG's of one kind or another, a literal escape from reality as they stop portraying themselves and portray someone else.
To get this audience the advertiser needs to accomplish two things:
1. He must become the geek. This market is very good at smelling phonies, If you've never played dungeons and dragons, you have no chance of marketing your product to them. They might buy it anyways for reasons of neccessity or convience, but they won't seek out your brand of sunglasses just because you claim to be in their hobby. You have to prove it to them.
2. He must accept the geek. This market tends to shy away from standing up for their hobby in the real world. While they don't expect to be cool, they don't want further social rejection. To gain their support, you need to support them. Be willing to alienate your "Cool-seeking" audience for the approval of the geeks. You can't expect to gain both audiences, you have to pick and choose.
This is not even really theory at this point, it's proven fact. A number of people have managed to gain quite a following through this method. Two notable examples are Felicia Day and Joss Whedon. Day has taken the MMORPG crowd and turned them into her own personal cult by casting off her standard Hollywood actor persona and accepting her videogame loving persona. It's not even clear if she is even an active videogame player, I know she plays Dungeons and Dragons once a week (Her twitter tells me so), but no hard evidence has been displayed that she is an active videogame player. Because she doesn't need to be. She's proven that she's atleast knowledgable about the subject, and has embraced it fully. And so, her fans have embraced her and anything she wants to sell us.
Joss Whedon is an amazing example. He doesn't need to divulge too much personal information about himself, his writing speaks for itself. It shows that he is into conspiracy theories, Sci-fi, westerns, vampires, werewolves, demons, etc. Even musicals are represented in his work. Whedon's shows are like a mecca for those who love that genre, so while he might not have his hands on the entirety of the audience, the audience he does have is intensely devoted.
The most amusing thing about this whole phenom is that advertisers are not sure what to do about this. For decades they have been trying to sell us an image of what they think we want to be. Now we have an audience who already knows who they want to be, they just need people to sell them things that they want to have. Some marketing for this audience would be simple to write. Want to sell more Pepsi? Show 20-something people playing whatever the latest videogame is and drinking Pepsi while they play. Others would be much more difficult. It'd be hard to convince this audience to buy a Gucci purse for a ridiculous price. However, offer them a Gucci gaming bag for a more reasonable price and they're in. You might have to compete with the $15 target bag that suits their needs just aswell. You can't sell them something that they can get just as good, for cheaper.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Goddamnitt Sam Raimi
So it's just been leaked. Sam Raimi is going to direct the World of Warcraft Movie.
Goddamnit.
Didn't you get the memo?
You are no longer allowed to ruin things we love.
There are 11 million WoW addicts in the world, and you are very likely going to disappoint all of them.
God-Fucking-Damnitt.
Goddamnit.
Didn't you get the memo?
You are no longer allowed to ruin things we love.
There are 11 million WoW addicts in the world, and you are very likely going to disappoint all of them.
God-Fucking-Damnitt.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Transformers & Child Actors
So I missed a week so you get two reviews.
Transformers: Revenge of the fallen.
Liked it, but I also liked the first one. It fufills the Michael Bay explosions quota but still managed to have something resembling a plot.
Some things to look for:
Super-Saiyan Optimus Prime
Angry ancient robot scottish man
RCx3
Wheelie
Some things to piss you off:
Characters not being named (Ratchet who?)
Sam being an emo bastard
Sam's parent's being retarded
Characters disappearing
The "Twins" super annoying for most of the film
If you liked the first one you will like this one. Don't go in expecting it to be anything but a Michael special effects action film.
Dickie Roberts: Former child star
I was surprised by this one. I threw it on expecting crap (It is david spade afterall) and was pleasantly surprised.
Especially considering the recent celebrity deaths, I think most viewers would find this movie rather topical and even slightly uplifting. If you hate children this is not the film for you as they are featured heavily in the story. But also surprisingly someone managed to write children in a less than retarded way. Usually writers seem to have forgotten what it was like to be a kid, and most dialogue of children in movies just sounds like a dumbed down version of what an adult would say. The kids in this movie were very well written, they clearly behave like kids, but they were actually much more believable than David Spade.
Transformers: Revenge of the fallen.
Liked it, but I also liked the first one. It fufills the Michael Bay explosions quota but still managed to have something resembling a plot.
Some things to look for:
Super-Saiyan Optimus Prime
Angry ancient robot scottish man
RCx3
Wheelie
Some things to piss you off:
Characters not being named (Ratchet who?)
Sam being an emo bastard
Sam's parent's being retarded
Characters disappearing
The "Twins" super annoying for most of the film
If you liked the first one you will like this one. Don't go in expecting it to be anything but a Michael special effects action film.
Dickie Roberts: Former child star
I was surprised by this one. I threw it on expecting crap (It is david spade afterall) and was pleasantly surprised.
Especially considering the recent celebrity deaths, I think most viewers would find this movie rather topical and even slightly uplifting. If you hate children this is not the film for you as they are featured heavily in the story. But also surprisingly someone managed to write children in a less than retarded way. Usually writers seem to have forgotten what it was like to be a kid, and most dialogue of children in movies just sounds like a dumbed down version of what an adult would say. The kids in this movie were very well written, they clearly behave like kids, but they were actually much more believable than David Spade.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Suffering in Twilight
Greetings my lovely readers, apologies for the lack of content for awhile, real life got in the way.
Now onto the subject at hand.
Your humble jester was feeling slightly masochistic last night and subjected himself to the movie Twilight based on the book of the same name. I've never read the book, but I had read a number of sources about it so that I would be aware of what I was getting myself into.
I was not prepared.
The movie follows Bela, a 17 year old Arizona girl who moves up to the Pacific northwest when her mother marries a minor league baseball player. No thought is given to why this 40-something year old woman is married to a professional athlete, nor why if the athlete is near her age that he'd still be professional near the end of his career.
But I digress, Bela is a awkward clumsy blank slate of a character, who somehow manages to maintain her strong forceful personality while not actually having a personality to be forceful about. Although she is supposedly plain and awkward, she instantly becomes the most popular girl in school. All the boys want to date her, all the girls want to be her. Rather than follow the normal progression and date one of her numerous suitors, she instead becomes obsessed with a boy who her only interaction with resulted in awkward silence and rudeness.
At this point the movie has truly lost interest for me, but I continued on with my torture.
After an endless montage of scenes where nothing happens, the viewers are shown that the boy in question is Edward, and that he is a vampire. His family of vampires are all incestious, yet somehow nobody really seems to care, nor notice the fact that each of the children has graduated Highschool atleast 10 times.
Which begs the question, If you are a 300 year old predator, why on god's green earth would you continue to subject yourself to highschool? All of them portrayed the mentality of 20-something individuals, much like the actors who played them, so it really makes no sense. I suppose it might allow the family another couple years of living in one spot before they needed to move again, but at most they'd have a decade before their lack of aging started looking suspicious.
I'll skip over all of the scenes that show off the vampire's powers, mainly because we've all seen vampire movies before and the powers don't really change, the one that was very strange was the infamous "sparkle" scene. Edward shows Bela what he looks like in the sunlight, a bizarre slightly sparkley mess. She tells him he looks beautiful, he responds that it's the skin of a killer.
This brings us to the numer one problem in the series. Edward is a useless character. He is not interesting in the slightest, all he does is show off special effects and alot of awkward brooding.
There is only one kissing scene in the movie and it ends abruptly because Edward can't stop himself from trying to eat Bela.
Bela, like any sane person, realizes that for her to truly be a part of Edward's life and for them to have a real relationship that doesn't involve him flinging himself across the room whenever they kiss, nor her being a liability for the family, that she needs to become a vampire.
If you've already suspended your disbelief enough to get this far into the movie, this is the part that will still make you angry. All the other vampires including his family voice their opinions that as a human she is a liability, rather than accept the obvious, Edward petutantly demands that if she really loves him, she'd be happy with living a mortal life alongside him. And the author reveals her failings when Bela replies "yea, ok, whatever you say crazy stalker man" (note: that is not what she actually said, but it was what was added to the dialogue in my mind damnitt).
But the real reason behind her not being turned into a vampire, is that without her being a mortal, the story would end. Edward is specifically attracted to her mortal qualities. He loves watching her sleep, eat, etc. He finds her human weakness adorable, and he really gets off being the knight in shining armor who comes in to rescue her constantly. If she were turned into a vampire, he'd no longer be interested in her.
Not that I'd complain, he was the least interesting character in the whole movie. A good author would take this horrifying piece of shit and turn it into "the adventures of Bela, the newb vampire". She'd have about a decade worth of content in her old life before she would need to sever ties with her birth family, all in all, might be a worthwhile story. But no, Edward refuses to let her turn into a vampire. The deed was done by an enemy vampire, and he undid it, against her expressed wishes.
The movie did have some good points, Bela played match maker with all the boys who wanted to date her and all the girls who wanted to be her. They were all insufferable characters, but atleast they got happy endings and stayed out of the plot as much as possible. Also the relationship between Bela and her father was relatively well done. It was actually one of the few relationships in the movie that was believable (the other being the relationship between Edward's "mother" and "father").
The last two gripes that I need to express on this movie are about the nature of Bela. All of the vampires describe her as smelling especially good, but never explain why that is. Edward is also able to read the minds of every character in the movie, with the exception of Bela, and it is never explained either.
Overall review:
AVOID THIS MOVIE AT ALL COSTS!
Seriously, the dialogue is so asinine that you will be wanting to stab your ears with anything nearby within a couple minutes. I think I may have developed a tumor in my left ear as a natural defense mechanism to this movie. None of the characters are particularly likeable, and none of the plot makes any sense. The only scene that was even remotely amusing was the Vampire Baseball scene, and that is only because we've never had a movie before where vampires played baseball.
I don't understand how this movie was as popular as it was, the whole thing makes zero sense. I guess I have just been putting too much faith in the intelligence of my fellow man.
There you go readers, I have suffered through yet another movie so that you don't have to. Last time I demanded cookies for my suffering, this time I expect volunteers to come play "who wants to give Jarriet a hummer and a burrito?" Many will enter, and I'll win. (Note: "Who wants to give Regdar a hummer and a burrito?" is not my creation, that is one from the lovely folks at http://creativejuices7.ning.com/ )
Now onto the subject at hand.
Your humble jester was feeling slightly masochistic last night and subjected himself to the movie Twilight based on the book of the same name. I've never read the book, but I had read a number of sources about it so that I would be aware of what I was getting myself into.
I was not prepared.
The movie follows Bela, a 17 year old Arizona girl who moves up to the Pacific northwest when her mother marries a minor league baseball player. No thought is given to why this 40-something year old woman is married to a professional athlete, nor why if the athlete is near her age that he'd still be professional near the end of his career.
But I digress, Bela is a awkward clumsy blank slate of a character, who somehow manages to maintain her strong forceful personality while not actually having a personality to be forceful about. Although she is supposedly plain and awkward, she instantly becomes the most popular girl in school. All the boys want to date her, all the girls want to be her. Rather than follow the normal progression and date one of her numerous suitors, she instead becomes obsessed with a boy who her only interaction with resulted in awkward silence and rudeness.
At this point the movie has truly lost interest for me, but I continued on with my torture.
After an endless montage of scenes where nothing happens, the viewers are shown that the boy in question is Edward, and that he is a vampire. His family of vampires are all incestious, yet somehow nobody really seems to care, nor notice the fact that each of the children has graduated Highschool atleast 10 times.
Which begs the question, If you are a 300 year old predator, why on god's green earth would you continue to subject yourself to highschool? All of them portrayed the mentality of 20-something individuals, much like the actors who played them, so it really makes no sense. I suppose it might allow the family another couple years of living in one spot before they needed to move again, but at most they'd have a decade before their lack of aging started looking suspicious.
I'll skip over all of the scenes that show off the vampire's powers, mainly because we've all seen vampire movies before and the powers don't really change, the one that was very strange was the infamous "sparkle" scene. Edward shows Bela what he looks like in the sunlight, a bizarre slightly sparkley mess. She tells him he looks beautiful, he responds that it's the skin of a killer.
This brings us to the numer one problem in the series. Edward is a useless character. He is not interesting in the slightest, all he does is show off special effects and alot of awkward brooding.
There is only one kissing scene in the movie and it ends abruptly because Edward can't stop himself from trying to eat Bela.
Bela, like any sane person, realizes that for her to truly be a part of Edward's life and for them to have a real relationship that doesn't involve him flinging himself across the room whenever they kiss, nor her being a liability for the family, that she needs to become a vampire.
If you've already suspended your disbelief enough to get this far into the movie, this is the part that will still make you angry. All the other vampires including his family voice their opinions that as a human she is a liability, rather than accept the obvious, Edward petutantly demands that if she really loves him, she'd be happy with living a mortal life alongside him. And the author reveals her failings when Bela replies "yea, ok, whatever you say crazy stalker man" (note: that is not what she actually said, but it was what was added to the dialogue in my mind damnitt).
But the real reason behind her not being turned into a vampire, is that without her being a mortal, the story would end. Edward is specifically attracted to her mortal qualities. He loves watching her sleep, eat, etc. He finds her human weakness adorable, and he really gets off being the knight in shining armor who comes in to rescue her constantly. If she were turned into a vampire, he'd no longer be interested in her.
Not that I'd complain, he was the least interesting character in the whole movie. A good author would take this horrifying piece of shit and turn it into "the adventures of Bela, the newb vampire". She'd have about a decade worth of content in her old life before she would need to sever ties with her birth family, all in all, might be a worthwhile story. But no, Edward refuses to let her turn into a vampire. The deed was done by an enemy vampire, and he undid it, against her expressed wishes.
The movie did have some good points, Bela played match maker with all the boys who wanted to date her and all the girls who wanted to be her. They were all insufferable characters, but atleast they got happy endings and stayed out of the plot as much as possible. Also the relationship between Bela and her father was relatively well done. It was actually one of the few relationships in the movie that was believable (the other being the relationship between Edward's "mother" and "father").
The last two gripes that I need to express on this movie are about the nature of Bela. All of the vampires describe her as smelling especially good, but never explain why that is. Edward is also able to read the minds of every character in the movie, with the exception of Bela, and it is never explained either.
Overall review:
AVOID THIS MOVIE AT ALL COSTS!
Seriously, the dialogue is so asinine that you will be wanting to stab your ears with anything nearby within a couple minutes. I think I may have developed a tumor in my left ear as a natural defense mechanism to this movie. None of the characters are particularly likeable, and none of the plot makes any sense. The only scene that was even remotely amusing was the Vampire Baseball scene, and that is only because we've never had a movie before where vampires played baseball.
I don't understand how this movie was as popular as it was, the whole thing makes zero sense. I guess I have just been putting too much faith in the intelligence of my fellow man.
There you go readers, I have suffered through yet another movie so that you don't have to. Last time I demanded cookies for my suffering, this time I expect volunteers to come play "who wants to give Jarriet a hummer and a burrito?" Many will enter, and I'll win. (Note: "Who wants to give Regdar a hummer and a burrito?" is not my creation, that is one from the lovely folks at http://creativejuices7.ning.com/ )
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Adventureland of Fail.
So, I watched "Adventureland" today, and per usual, I suffer so you may all avoid the same fate.
Some of your friends may tell you that it's a good movie.
These are Not your friends. They are crazy goddamn aliens in your friend's body's.
Do not trust these pod-people, they lie.
The movie was awful, in every way.
Even Ryan Reynolds couldn't save that movie, in fact they wrote his character so poorly that it actually made the movie worse for having to watch him act so poorly.
The only highlights from the movie are the scenes with Bill Hader, and you saw all of those in the commercials.
Basic plot rundown:
The year is 1979, James, our douchebag "Im so awkwardly successful" main character just finished up his under-grad, and is now in the summer before grad school. He had planned to go to europe with his buddy before moving to New York, but his dad gets demoted at work and the family can no longer afford his trip, nor college, so he goes to work at the local seasonal theme park where he meets the rest of the characters.
Now a couple things to clarify:
1- James (Jesse Eisenberg) is actually playing the part of Michael Cera. If you've seen "Superbad", it's the same goddamn character. And guess what? both movies were directed by the same douche.
2- The entire group dynamic is exactly the same as "Waiting" also with Ryan Reynolds, however Reynolds was funny in that one.
That being said, the movie progresses with James getting involved with Emily (Kristen Stewart) who is in turn involved with Connel (Reynolds). This horrifying love triangle continues for most of the movie until absolutely everything goes wrong, Em runs to New York, and James eventually follows her and apologizes even though she was entirely to blame for all of his problems. At this point in the movie, everyone's life is significantly more fucked than they were at the beginning of the film, and the only improvement is that James is no longer a virgin.
The whole movie was yet another cluster-fuck piece of garbage where the writer proclaims "Isn't this specific piece of American coming-of-age entirely different from the other 30 American coming-of-age stories that came out in the last 2 years?!?!"
Seriously, I can give you the short list now:
Nick and Norah's infinite playlist
Superbad
Twilight
4 months, 3 weeks, & 2 days
Be kind, rewind
A complete history of my sexual failures
Juno
And those are just the obvious ones.
All of these movies have the same bullshit premise: "Im your average everyday normal American, and a rather statistically normal event happens to me, and I feel my normal adaptation to these normal problems is somehow worthy of a movie."
Seriously? Wtf? Juno= Teenage pregnancy. So common it's not even funny.
Adventureland= tight finances causing younger members of a family to need to get a summer job.
None of these things are at all surprising and they are all beyond cliche'.
Do yourself a favor, skip this piece of hollywood crap. If you actually watch it, you'll want those 100 minutes of your life back.
Some of your friends may tell you that it's a good movie.
These are Not your friends. They are crazy goddamn aliens in your friend's body's.
Do not trust these pod-people, they lie.
The movie was awful, in every way.
Even Ryan Reynolds couldn't save that movie, in fact they wrote his character so poorly that it actually made the movie worse for having to watch him act so poorly.
The only highlights from the movie are the scenes with Bill Hader, and you saw all of those in the commercials.
Basic plot rundown:
The year is 1979, James, our douchebag "Im so awkwardly successful" main character just finished up his under-grad, and is now in the summer before grad school. He had planned to go to europe with his buddy before moving to New York, but his dad gets demoted at work and the family can no longer afford his trip, nor college, so he goes to work at the local seasonal theme park where he meets the rest of the characters.
Now a couple things to clarify:
1- James (Jesse Eisenberg) is actually playing the part of Michael Cera. If you've seen "Superbad", it's the same goddamn character. And guess what? both movies were directed by the same douche.
2- The entire group dynamic is exactly the same as "Waiting" also with Ryan Reynolds, however Reynolds was funny in that one.
That being said, the movie progresses with James getting involved with Emily (Kristen Stewart) who is in turn involved with Connel (Reynolds). This horrifying love triangle continues for most of the movie until absolutely everything goes wrong, Em runs to New York, and James eventually follows her and apologizes even though she was entirely to blame for all of his problems. At this point in the movie, everyone's life is significantly more fucked than they were at the beginning of the film, and the only improvement is that James is no longer a virgin.
The whole movie was yet another cluster-fuck piece of garbage where the writer proclaims "Isn't this specific piece of American coming-of-age entirely different from the other 30 American coming-of-age stories that came out in the last 2 years?!?!"
Seriously, I can give you the short list now:
Nick and Norah's infinite playlist
Superbad
Twilight
4 months, 3 weeks, & 2 days
Be kind, rewind
A complete history of my sexual failures
Juno
And those are just the obvious ones.
All of these movies have the same bullshit premise: "Im your average everyday normal American, and a rather statistically normal event happens to me, and I feel my normal adaptation to these normal problems is somehow worthy of a movie."
Seriously? Wtf? Juno= Teenage pregnancy. So common it's not even funny.
Adventureland= tight finances causing younger members of a family to need to get a summer job.
None of these things are at all surprising and they are all beyond cliche'.
Do yourself a favor, skip this piece of hollywood crap. If you actually watch it, you'll want those 100 minutes of your life back.
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