Tag: movie

I have never actually seen the original Fright Night, but my best friend Kat has, and she seemed to think the remake did just fine. As someone completely new to the franchise, I felt like it was well worth my $8.50 at the local AMC.

I don’t think I need to get spoilery, since it’s not the sort of movie that I want to dissect when it comes to plot and characterization. It was just fun. The pacing was excellent, the humor and horror were mixed well. Colin Farell was delightfully creepy in both the “holy shit, vampire” and “yucky dude from next door that hits on your mom” kind of way. David Tennant was in leather pants.

Let me repeat that for my fellow Doctor Who fangirls: David Tennant was in leather pants.

There was suspense, and creepiness, and just enough ridiculous gore to remind me that even though I was squirming in my seat at times, the movie was one big nodding, winking joke about vampires. (“Jerry the vampire?”) It makes me happy when I see movies where vampires are giant, gross bastards instead of whiny drama queens who want to spend all eternity writing poetry and gazing soulfully at teenaged girls.

And the part I liked the most? The characters weren’t dumb. It’s so rare to see a horror (even if it should be “horror” here, I suppose) movie where the characters are actually competent. There wasn’t really a time in the entire movie where I felt like shouting at the screen, as if that would prevent someone from doing something hideously stupid, and that’s rare indeed.

I recommend it, definitely.

Which is really what the title of X-Men: First Class ought to be. since it is an apology, I think, for at the very least X-Men 3: Insert Inane Subtitle Here and the howling comedy that was supposed to be Wolverine’s movie. Though if you’re me, it’s also an apology for the first two movies, because I’m still not ready to let go of the Halle Berry as Storm thing, and I probably never will because the nerdrage is strong with this one.

Though I’m also forced to admit, I’m not exactly X-Men fan number one. I have only read a few of the comics, and kind of gave up on them because it was just too difficult to figure out which comics I should be reading and in what order and if there was any sort of continuity. My hat’s off to you, comic book fans. I don’t know how you keep track of it all. It’s right up there with the time my grandmother tried to describe the current set of plots for The Young and the Restless to me. Except with mutant powers and more love children.

I actually liked the X-Men because I watched the cartoon when I was growing up. I don’t know if this makes me a hopeless noob. I have no idea how it meets the standards of the comics, and if I’m being honest, if I watched it now I’d be surprised if it was half as good as my memory claims it is. As is often the case with one’s beloved Saturday Morning cartoons.

Anyway, I was ready to give up on X-Men movies completely. I’m glad that Isaac and David told me how awesome this one is, and went with me to see it.

I think out of the summer movies so far, I still like Thor a bit better, but I liked First Class enough to go see it a second time (by myself) this morning. This is mostly due to James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, though I liked most everyone in that movie other than Rose Byrne, who just never convinced me she was a CIA agent let alone a viable love interest for Charles Xavier. I’ll admit to a certain amount of prejudice since I do like me some slash, but I’m also not one to insist on an OTP that makes absolutely no sense. So nyar.

(A few small spoilers)

Anyway, I think the thing I really liked about First Class was what it did for Magneto as a character. It made his entire attitude a lot more understandable, and really set up an interesting dynamic between him and Charles. To be honest, by the end of the movie I was really rooting for Magneto’s viewpoint, because to hell with all of that hippy dippy love everyone shit when the fleets of two nations that were five minutes ago almost at war decide to settle their differences by killing the poor mutant schmucks on the beach who technically just saved the goddamn world. Particularly when the best defense Charles could come up with was, “They were just following orders.” Ouch.

So yes, it’s excellent, go see it.

Also, as ridiculous as this is, Magneto’s power is really giving me fits. And yes, I know, that’s stupid considering the dude in the movie who can shoot red hula hoops of energy out of his chest. But it just bugs my little geek brain that it’s implied to be some kind of magnetic thing, when he spends all of his time messing around with metals that aren’t actually magnetic.

Which sort of gives a new twist on him not being able to move the coin for Shaw at the beginning of the movie. “I can’t! I can’t! It’s not actually magnetic!” YES I KNOW IT’S RIDICULOUS.

It was suggested that maybe it’s more of an inducing a current and therefore a magnetic field because hey, that at least opens up any metal that’s conductive. That’s about the point where I fell off the physics train, so I have no idea if that’s even a plausible half-assed explanation for being able to saw through someone’s head with a piece of currency. Though if that is Magneto’s actual power, it would make sense he’d want to stick to a more magnetism-sounding name. “The Inducer” just doesn’t sound that intimidating… more like it would be his stripper stage name.

(/spoilers)

Enough overthinking things that really ought to be covered under the suspension of disbelief anyway. But I find it entertaining.

I’m hoping they’ll do another movie with the younger Professor X and Magneto, though at the same time I’m a little scared of it, knowing how Hollywood does love to fuck up a sequel.

Speaking of, saw the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Not even Johnny Depp doing his Keith Richards impression was enough to keep me from checking my phone to see how much longer this could possibly go on. Pirates failed abjectly where the X-Men succeeded.

The better men, indeed.

My friends, I present you with: 2012: Ice Age

There’s a volcano. It unleashes a glacier. Don’t ask me how. But it’s a fast glacier. A really, really, really, really fast glacier that’s like a brazillion thousand miles across and can get from the Arctic to the US in a day or two, because it is seriously pissed off and has installed a turbo. And then it destroys New York City, because that’s what you do when you’re the world’s fastest glacier that’s been set free by a volcano. Because New York City once spat on your shoes and called your mom a fucking ice cube.

I think I may have to watch this movie. It looks even more hilarious than The Day After Tomorrow.

The sad thing is, I want to believe this is some kind of ridiculous parody. But I don’t think it actually is.

ETA: One of my guildies suggested that this movie should actually be Speed 3, with Keanu driving the glacier. I am not ashamed to admit that I would pay perfectly good money to see that.

The Adjustment Bureau is two hours of lovely fun laced with just enough suspense and paranoia and Matt Damon looking both earnest and tasty, which is then completely ruined by the last three minutes of ridiculous feel-good cop out ending.

Seriously. If you’re going to make a movie out of a fucking Philip K. Dick story, DON’T GIVE IT A FUCKING HAPPY ENDING.

If you do go see the movie – and I actually recommend that you do, since it’s mostly very good – I recommend just walking out of the theater when the two people are kissing on the roof. (Being intentionally vague since it could be spoilery.) Just pretend the movie ends there, and you won’t get that moment of enraging let-down that comes with the credits rolling.

Also, and this is a SPOILER:

Anyone else that has seen the movie – do you find it a bit odd that the only non-white character in the entire film is the “renegade” angel? There’s the bit where Matt Damon says something like, “You seem different from the others,” to him, and it’s hard not to snort considering that everyone else from the Bureau is a Middle-Aged or Old White Dude.

/SPOILER

Day was a lot of fun, and something I desperately needed after the hellish, stressful, and morale destroying week I’ve had. It’s been one of those weeks where I spent a lot of time asking myself why the hell I’m in grad school. Though I did manage to finally beat the cold that’s been hanging on to me for two weeks, after I decided I was exhausted and just didn’t give a shit any more and then went home and slept for nearly ten hours. So yes, kids, sleep is still important, even when you’re a (sort of) grown up.

Today Mike and I saw Kat and Aki and Mina, ate food, watched a movie, talked a bunch. Much relaxation had by all, I think. Normally Mina wants Mike to read to her, but it was my turn today I guess. I spent quite a bit of the day stretched out on the floor next to her, reading her little picture books and adding occasional sarcastic commentary.

Most amusing part of the day: Showed up in the morning while Mina was watching Sesame Street. Bert was singing a song about how he couldn’t find Ernie in their bedroom. I suggested, “He’s probably in the closet.”

Home from England, safe and sound. I’ve been fed (thanks to my parents) and have also taken a shower so I no longer smell like the inside of a plane. So really, I’m feeling refreshed and human again, but incredibly tired. I knew we’d gotten back into the US of A when, upon entering the immigration area, there was a TSA agent wandering around and telling everyone that we had to keep our cell phones off because it was illegal to have them on. For no apparent reason. Oh capricious and ridiculous airport security, I haven’t missed you at all.

I spent most of the flight back watching movies. One of them was Agora, which is a movie about the fall of Alexandria to the Christians and the death of Hypatia. So, I expected it to be a very depressing movie, because we all know what happens to Hypatia.**

What I didn’t expect was how angry the movie made me feel. Not angry at the movie, but just angry, the emotion building up from helpless frustration.

One image the movie kept coming back to was the library of Alexandria, after it had been ransacked by the Christians. The movie showed it as basically being destroyed inside, the scrolls torn up or gone entirely because they’d been burned, and animals were then penned inside it. The willful, gleeful disregard and hatred of knowledge made me angry, even if it was just a movie, even if it was an event that happened over a thousand years ago.

Then I think about our modern day situation, say, with John Shimkus on the Energy and Environment subcommittee, claiming that global climate change can’t be true because of something the Bible says. And I feel exactly the same sort of building, helpless frustration, because I don’t think we’ve really changed at all since Hypatia was flayed and dragged through the streets of Alexandria.

It’s a good movie. Watch it. Be prepared to cry at the end. And to feel angry, so angry, every time you see the destroyed library, every time someone makes an argument based completely on illogic and blind belief that simply can’t be refuted because no one would listen.

** – Just in case you don’t know, let’s just say that the Christians didn’t give her chocolates and an award for being female, outspoken, and interested in science.

Toward the end of this movie, there’s an odd scene that takes place in the passenger area of the Expendables’ ass-kicking cargo plane of doom, where the token black guy (Terry Crews) shows off his weapons to one of his fellow mercenaries. His final weapon is an extremely shiny straight razor with a handle made of transparent, neon-yellow plastic. The sight of that weapon literally made me say, “What the fuck?”

This is pretty much a metaphor for the entire movie experience.

I really wanted to like this movie. I really did. It had the hallmarks of the ridiculous but fun action flick. Kind of like The Scorpion King, a movie that I like in a sort of shame-filled way.

There was a good amount of fake, spraying blood. There was a gun that, at the beginning of the movie, literally tore someone in half and left the legs comically standing alone for a moment while the torso splattered against a wall. There were a dizzying array of knives (most of them wielded by Jason Statham’s character) which were apparently made with steel with such a strong anti-reality resonance that bone simply ceased to exist as soon as it contacted the blade.

But. But.

I don’t ask for a lot of plot out of my action movies. But I do like what little plot there is to be, I don’t know, coherent.

The Expendables feels less like a film and more like a series of loosely collected scenes that have been arranged randomly. And all of the dialog was drawn, half a line at a time, from a box. I think that some of the scenes were supposed to be character development. Instead, it normally amounted to two characters saying random things to each other for about three minutes, at which point the spraying blood and explosions would mercifully resume.

I wish I could give you a plot summary, but I really can’t. The best I can manage is that Stallone and his group are mercenaries. Except one of them burns out and goes crazy and tries to kill Stallone in the middle of the movie, after miraculously transporting himself to and from the tiny Latin American island hell hole where the Evil General lives. There is a douchey guy in a suit, who I initially guessed must be an American politician; I was close, he was an ex-FBI agent gone evil. There was the crazy general, who spent most of his time oscillating randomly between spanish and nonsensical English. He is sort of the pawn of the douchey suit guy, who wants him to grow drugs, or something, except nothing is getting done because the general’s soldiers keep kidnapping civilians and then not putting them to work in the plantations. There was the evil general’s daughter, who was Stallone’s love interest. There was Charisma Carpenter as Jason Statham’s girlfriend, causing a strange little sideplot where Mr. Statham beats the ever-loving shit out of a bunch of jerks on a basketball court.

The movie culminates in an orgy of gunfire, stabbing, and explosions, where the douchey suit guy shoots the general and then tries to kidnap his daughter for no apparent reason, despite the fact that earlier in the movie he was all for just killing her and having done with it. And I can’t even say the spraying bullets and blood were all that interesting, because on several occasions during the climactic action sequence the focus was jumping between three or four individual fight scenes with no logic or warning.

That’s also how the two major car chase scenes go as well. They actually become boring because it’s impossible to tell where the vehicles are relative to each other, and it’s really just an unnecessary pause in the bloodletting anyway.

The movie is an exercise in wasted potential. Jet Li appears in the film, but spends most of his time getting his ass handed to him by much taller white guys. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger appear in the movie for a combined total of five minutes and then, no doubt feeling the threat to their careers, never appear again. Mickey Rourke plays a tattoo artist who was presumably once a mercenary himself – he’s quite good at throwing knives – but spends most of his time trying to develop a character that is wholly uninvolved in the plot (such as it is) and has about as much depth and charm as Sarah Palin anyway.

The movie doesn’t so much end as drop in its tracks, exhausted by its own meaningless existence, with Statham making up a “poem” that had me trying to crawl between the couch cushions to escape it.

You will notice that at no point do I name any of the characters. This is because, over the course of the movie, I simply could not be bothered to learn them. The names, like the characters themselves, felt like an afterthought, a formality added to the mix to justify this as a movie rather than one hundred minutes of random people getting shot and stabbed and blown up.

Before it was over, I tried to convince myself that The Expendables was some sort of high-level satire of the action genre. What convinced me this couldn’t be possible was a scene in the middle of the movie where the general’s daughter is waterboarded by the douchey suit guy. That one scene in the midst of the ridiculous mess of a movie was disturbing and strong. And it also made me realize that, to a certain extent, the movie was meant seriously. Which somehow makes it worse.

We don’t ask much of our action movies, but this one fails on all counts. You’re better off watching nearly any other movie that any of these actors have been in. My personal recommendation would be Die Hard. Or, failing that, you’ll still get better quality story and acting from – and it pains me to say this – The Scorpion King.

The quick review: You really, really, really ought to go see this movie.

If Memento was the warm up, Inception was the main event. I really don’t want to go into a lot of detail about the story or the concept. If you want to know either, you can read other reviews and get a reasonable explanation of both. But to be honest, I think it’s best to just go in knowing that there are dreams, and a McGuffin that allows people to share them, and then you can just get knocked on your ass by the rest.

It says a lot about the writing, and how tightly plotted the movie was that afterward, my husband and our friend David were bickering about whether or not a section of screen time that was supposed to be three minutes actually was three minutes long, or if it was longer because it felt longer. When the plot of the movie is so tight that you are left with nothing to pick at but tiny details, it is impressive indeed.

And of course, there was one moment of plotty gut punching powerful and genuine enough that it made every occupant of the theater let out a dismayed exclamation at exactly the same time. Which is quite the accomplishment when you consider the average audience, which has had its brain melted by horrible attempts at 3D this summer.

It’s beautiful, and it’s suspenseful, and I actually cared about each and every one of the characters. Go see it.

And: Soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. Bigger win than Sherlock Holmes on the music front, and I didn’t think that was possible.