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[Movie] The most disappointing thing about Edge of Tomorrow is its title

Couldn’t you have come up with something better for a title? Really? I felt like I should be seeing an episode of Star Trek. Or perhaps Lady Gaga would appear at any moment, wearing disturbingly avant garde yet somehow still sexy robotic battle armor with unbelievable high heels, and belt out a song while pyrotechnics go off in the background.

Come on. The book this was based on was titled All You Need Is Kill. That’s an awesome title. Why not just stick with that?

Complaints about the title aside, I actually really liked this movie. Which surprised me, since I had read the review from Strange Horizons and went in all braced to reach the same kind of frothing rage levels to which Oblivion originally drove me. Which couldn’t be good for my blood pressure, but these are the things I do for you people. But I was pleasantly surprised, and I’m not sure if I will ever find it in my heart to forgive Tom Cruise for making me like him again, even if just a little.

The shortkey for Edge of Tomorrow‘s plot is “Groundhog Day as military scifi with an alien invasion.” Which is not inaccurate. Though Groundhog Day displayed a notable lack of powered battle armor that caused people to run like they were about to shit in their pants. And an even more profound lack of Emily Blunt’s arms. And I hope we can all agree that from this day forward, all movies should be required to give at least two full minutes of screen time to Emily Blunt’s arms.

Anyway, the plot.

Due to a MacGuffin, Tom Cruise (named Cage, as a nod to Keiji, hero of All You Need Is Kill) repeats the same day over and over again. Rita (Emily Blunt) had the MacGuffin until recently, but lost it for reasons that I’ll call good enough to pass. She works with Cage and a scientist who is the only person who believed her when she was repeating days to try and stop the alien invasion.

For the most part, it works. If you can accept the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey that goes on, the movie is actually a lot of fun. Cage dies a lot, and a lot of those times involve Rita shooting him in the head to reset him because he’s just fucked up that badly in his training. There’s snark, and some highly amusing deaths that made me laugh out loud. It was internally consistent with what it did, didn’t belabor the days repeating once the audience had gotten the point, and so on. The pacing was good, there were twists, I liked it.

Honestly, I have only two real complaints, which are a bit spoilery:

  1. Considering Rita makes it very clear early on in their partnership that she is so incredibly disinterested in having sex with Cage that it’s not even funny, I really could have done without the bit of romance that got thrown in there. I feel like it should have been more than enough for Cage to have a deep, mutual friendship with Rita, considering they’re literally the only two people on the planet that understand what the other person is going through. I consider it a small mercy that the actual bits of romance took up very little screen time, but I sure rolled my eyes when it did come up.
  2. The last five minutes. What the hell, man. Just. What the hell. It was precisely the expected cowardice we see in most films like this, where a potentially meaty ending gets completely short circuited by the desire to see the hero survive triumphant and get the girl. This ending also completely circumvents the MaGuffin rules (the timey-wimey gets way too wibbly-wobbly at this point) that have been faithfully obeyed throughout the entire rest of the movie, which made it extra annoying.

I came out of this really liking Rita as a character, by the way. For all that she was inextricably tied to Cage since he was the one with the MacGuffin and not her, I feel like throughout the film she was the force really pushing him along and keeping him moving. While he had to live day after day to choreograph their way through various scenarios, she hung ferociously on to her goal the entire time and kept pushing him. In the two occasions where he very overtly tries to “save” her to her face, she refuses to accept it. At the end, she even firmly tells him that neither of them are making it out alive and gives him a look that clearly communicates suck it up, cupcake. I really liked her. And her arms. But mostly her. (Also, I appreciated that the movie managed to refrain from making her a sex object except for pretty much one shot, which I will forgive because her arms. You don’t understand. I want to run away to the mountains and marry Emily Blunt’s arms.)

Tom Cruise did a credible job as Cage, leaving the scenery largely ungnawed. I personally felt like he did a good job of depicting (in perhaps uncharacteristically subtle ways) when given a chance just how the endless cycle of life and death was messing with him. It wasn’t nearly as explicit as what we saw in Groundhog Day, but it was there.

Smarter and much more internally consistent than your average big budget scifi/action tentpole, Edge of Tomorrow has left me pleased when I thought I wouldn’t be. But goddammit, that means I’m going to have to give Tom Cruise yet another chance. Curses!

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feminism movie

[Movie] Maleficent

Going to start this one off with a disclaimer, which is this:

I am not an original dyed-in-the-wool Maleficent fangirl. I do not have a massive ladyboner for this Disney villain the way quite a few of my friends do. So I’m taking this movie as itself. It’s been well over a decade (man, probably closer to two) since I last watched Sleeping Beauty, so all I really can say about the original animated lady of menace is that she sure had some style. 

TL;DR: I have absolutely nothing to say about how this movie relates to the character as seen in Sleeping Beauty. So please don’t yell at me.

All right.

I really, really liked this movie. Even more than I expected to, and I was already looking forward to it.

Angelina Jolie? Fucking amazing. I am already so in love with that woman I could write odes to her (non-enhanced) cheekbones, so this did not surprise me. She made a stylish Maleficent, from menacing to downright intimidating even when she was being “good.” And man, those contacts she had. Holy crap, her eyes.

Other than Maleficent, Diaval (Sam Riley), and Stephen (Sharlto Copley), there wasn’t a lot to most of the characters. I found the three pixies particularly grating. There were some odd pacing issues, and the movie seems to kind of get lost and meander during the second act until it remembers where it’s going and launches into the third.

The movie was pretty enough, but could never quite decide if it wanted to look realistic or be overtly cartoonish. I think either style can work just fine (even cartoonish does all right mixed with live action if the movie just jumps in with both feet) but never being willing to commit to one or the other or draw lines between the two realities of the film didn’t serve it well visually. I found myself wishing there was less cgi. A lot less cgi. Particularly when they were in the fairy lands, pretty much everything was computer generated and some of it just…didn’t quite make it out of the uncanny valley, I think. (And missed a golden opportunity for some gorgeous puppets and practical effects.) Or maybe it just looked a little too fake. I found the miniaturized pixies disturbing. They just did not look right in some fundamental way that really bothered me. Score was all right but nothing to write home about.

So, not the best offering I could have hoped for. Honestly, Snow White and the Huntsman did a much better job visually, I think.

What really made me like Maleficent was the story itself, and I found several aspects of it very interesting:

Going to cut this now for major spoilers.

Continue reading “[Movie] Maleficent”
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movie science fiction

I am sorry you were held captive in a windowless basement in 2013

I was going to rant about this on Twitter, but bleh. Quick blog post is easier: The Sad State of Modern Sci-fi

Short summary: They do not make amazing scifi movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey any more. CGI is ruining everything. There hasn’t been a good (in this case defined as thoughtful and intelligent) scifi movie since Moon in 2009.

Mr. Forward: I am extremely sorry to hear that last year, you were held captive in a windowless basement by evil, scifi-hating orcs and thus not allowed to go to the theater and see Her or Gravity (which relied heavily upon cgi). The former, I’ll note, won a richly-deserved Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The latter won several Oscars, including taking home Best Director for Alfonso Cuarón. (Now, to be fair, Mr. Forward’s post is from February 14, 2014, so he couldn’t have known this would happen.) I am also saddened to hear your subterranean prison did not have pay-per-view, and thus you were incapable of accessing Europa Report–a movie that was not without its problems, but was still an extremely solid offering for the genre if your requirements are thoughtful and intelligent.

And you’ll note here, I’m just sticking with the hardest scifi I can find. Go into softer scifi and you get Under the Skin. If you want to expand out toward fantasy, I can offer quite a few more movies that definitely deserve to be called thoughtful and intelligent in 2013, including Byzantium and Only Lovers Left Alive.

2013 was an incredible year for genre film, any way you slice it. While most of what I named were smaller, independent films, Gravity had a lifetime domestic gross of ~$274 million, not too far behind 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s inflation adjusted lifetime domestic gross of ~$297 million. Those numbers ain’t anything to sneeze at.

I guess you could dismiss the films I’ve named as not good enough in relation to the examples you hold up. It’s probably true that they’re never going to make another film like 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that’s okay. That film already exists, and has held up through time. Let the filmmakers of today make different films and seek the answers for different questions. If Her and Gravity are insufficient in your eyes, I’d question if you’re defining good scifi cinema as thoughtful explorations of big questions on film, or as thoughtful explorations of big questions on film that precisely  fit your personal taste. At which point you lose my sympathy if your taste is so narrow as all that.

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[Movie] X-Men: Days of Future Past

I don’t actually have too many major thoughts on this movie, other than gosh it was a nice gift to all us Charles/Erik shippers. (/cough) It was explodey and colorful and pretty much everything I’ve come to expect from one of these movies, which is in some ways good and in some ways bad. I thought it was well-shot, the soundtrack was…all right but I won’t run out and buy it like I did for X-Men: First Class. No complaints about any of the actors. This movie definitely takes the promise (and apology) of X-Men: First Class and delivers on it.

Stuff that made me happy:

  • While I wanted more Mystique, I loved the fact that the plot ultimately hinges on her. And not just on her, but on the choices she makes of her own free will. The plot easily could have gone that bullshit place where, say, Mystique was captured and she had to be rescued or something, but it didn’t. That made me happy. Also, while at times it felt that Erik and Charles were trying to frame things as some sort of choice between them, she ultimately made her own decision and walked out under her own power. I appreciated that immensely.
  • Loved all the new mutants.
  • I actually really liked Quicksilver and I’d been kind of dreading him from the moment I saw the costume design and seriously what the fuck was his hair. But the whole bit of the movie that involved him was excellent, and fun, and I loved how they also did the special effects for it. The entire prison break subplot was definitely my favorite part of the movie.
  • Peter Dinklage was excellent as Trask (and as Mystique pretending to be Trask on one occasion). He does a very banal sort of evil well and makes an excellent villain. The movie also never went the cheap route and explicitly tried to make his actions about his dwarfism. Also, excellently tailored suits.
  • So much epic bromance with Charles and Erik, and in two different time periods. It was lovely, and the four actors involved were amazing, leaving absolutely no on surprised.

Stuff that really could have been better:

  •  I think they did Mystique’s makeup/costume differently for this movie than First Class, and I can’t say I liked it. In close-ups, there was a weird lack of texture to it that just bothered me.
  • For all that I loved them, we didn’t get to see much of the new mutants. And most of what we did see involved them getting slaughtered. And considering that most of the cast diversity was seen in that group, that made me very sad.
  • And because of the above point, Mystique was functionally the only developed female character in the film. And she was awesome, don’t get me wrong, but I still found that immensely disappointing. There are just so many amazing women in the X-Men universe.
  • Still not over the fact that they decided to have Wolverine go back in time instead of Kitty. Yes, they came up with a reasonable(ish) bullshit reason to do it within the movie plot. But still.
  • Wish that there’d been a bit more actual 70s in the costume and set design, or maybe I’ve just got the wrong idea about what the 70s looked like since I wasn’t actually alive back then. It just didn’t seem nearly colorful enough in that sense.

All in all, I’m feeling pretty optimistic about the next movie, which definitely puts this one way ahead of X-men 2. (Before the credits had even started rolling on that one, I’d already decided I wasn’t going to see X-Men 3.) And it’s going to be Apocalypse! Which could be… interesting. Cautious optimism. Here’s hoping we’ll get more of the amazing female mutants than just Mystique next time around.

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movie

[Movie] Chef

Which should be subtitled: Or: 115 minutes of unrelenting food porn; if you don’t leave the theater prepared to murder a hobo if it will only get you a cubano, you are either the most self-controlled vegan who has ever lived or dead.

So that is the first thing you need to know about Chef. It’s a nearly two hour ode to food. But it’s so much more than that. Considering that most mainstream movies these days are still very much about being dark or edgy in some way, where there’s angst and tragic pasts and manpain everywhere, movies that very conspicuously avoid those things really stand out to me. Because you can look at the characters in them and think yeah, I know someone like that. Or yeah, that’s me. The characters feel so much more rich for it, full of an ordinary kind of life that makes them feel infinitely more real than the overemphasized caricatures with which we basically get inundated. Characters grow and change and learn lessons and no one has to have a melodramatic run through the rain or throws dishes on the floor or flees in slow motion from an explosion.

The plot itself is something you could imagine happening in real life–chef loses his job (okay, the melodramatic blow-up at the food critic is perhaps a bit over the top, but hilarious) and decides to start a food truck. Picks the truck up in Miami and drives it back to California with his son and his line cook. And on the way, it becomes a love letter to the landscape, food, and music of the Gulf Coast states.

It’s a movie with a lot to say about creativity–both the kind specifically involved in cooking and the arts in general–and criticism, and how art is supposed to touch peoples’ lives in a very personal way, and does so without ever getting into navel-gazing territory. It has a lot to say about relationships, about being happy and fulfilled, heck, even about social media. (Though regarding relationships, the only bit in the movie I didn’t like was the last three minutes, but that was for very personal reasons.)

But I think what I loved the most was how real it all felt in comparison to the movies I’m used to seeing. Like I said, you could look at any one of those characters and believe they were a real person that you could run in to around the corner. Beyond that, I loved the fact that it had an R-rating, and the only reason for that was because the word fuck was used so often–because you can’t have a believable kitchen without the f-word. I loved that there was so much Spanish in the movie, and none of it subtitled, in the kitchens, used by Chef Carl’s ex-wife Inez, used by his line cook Martin. That’s not something that happens often in mainstream film either. And I loved that there was no “darkest hour before dawn” moment, that a guy and his ex-wife managed to have a great friendship, that there was an amazing scene where the kid just got to sit there and look mortified that Carl and Martin were singing along to this song while driving down the highway:

Movies like this remind you that life has its own tiny dramas, but at the end of the day it’s a journey and you just get on with living it–and there is nothing boring about that. Life is rich and amazing and full of laughter and beauty and love.

This movie is fucking awesome. You come out of it just feeling good about being alive. You should go see it. Plan to get a cubano after.

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movie

[Movie] Under the Skin

7dcMy reaction to Under the Skin, summed up by well known philosopher, critic, and Hero of Canton, Jayne Cobb.

Because I am an adult and make excellent life choices, I decided to see this movie at 2230 on Sunday, even knowing that it would mean getting less than five hours of sleep before work on Monday. Because I’d heard wonderful things about it, and I have yet to see something that involves Scarlet Johansson that I haven’t loved to pieces. And the concept behind the movie also sounded so interesting–psychological thriller about an alien stalking Glasgow and doing terrible things to unsuspecting human men until she discovers some inner well of humanity? Sign me up.

I have no idea now, why people are calling this movie a psychological thriller as opposed to horror. I’m guessing because (at least in America) it’s not horror if it doesn’t involve jump scares and copious amounts of blood. Well, I don’t watch a lot of horror movies because I don’t really like either of those things all that much. But they also don’t really tend to leave me feeling fucked up for hours and days afterward. I claim Under the Skin is horror because it managed to fill me with existential dread for well over a day and kept me from sleeping. The last movie that did that? Kairo. The original Japanese horror movie, not that shitty American…whatever it was.

There is nothing about this movie that wasn’t fundamentally disturbing. Scarlet Johansson spends a lot of time staring at the world with dead eyes…except when she’s attempting to lure a hapless (and completely lonely) man to her exceptionally creepy and very water-damaged house. I can’t tell you precisely what happens to the men because it’s never explicitly stated, but it starts out with naked, boner-sporting fellows sinking down into a bottomless pool that the alien simply walks across like it’s solid, continues on to them being sucked out of their goddamn skins so literally there is an empty fucking skin floating in the water, and ends with what sure does look like ground meat and bonemeal slurry going down a chute.

The dialog is minimal, which only leads to the feeling of complete unease. The score is not going to win any prizes for beauty, but it does what it’s supposed to do with efficiency, which is make the audience feel intensely unsettled at every possible moment. The score was composed mostly of sustained chords, which were incredibly discordant and became less so as the alien experiences her shift in personality. The movie takes its time with long scenes, not terribly unlike the alien walking slowly backwards as she lures men into the dark room where they’ll ultimately get turned inside-out for the the crime of just really wanting to fuck a pretty woman. (A pretty woman, I’ll note, doing one of the least sexy strip teases that has ever been put to film.) It’s long, and drawn out, and at times you want to beg it to have mercy and just. Fucking. Stop.

But it is, by the way, fucking gorgeous. Large portions of this movie could easily act as a tourism advertisement for Scotland; forests and shorelines and the countryside all have their moments to shine. Except for the bit where the take home message seems to be: Come to Scotland, it’s a magical place where you might be picked up by a woman in a molester van and then get liquified after 24 hours of terrifying captivity on a bottomless swimming pool.

One thing I found interesting was the amount of nudity in this movie, which surprised me considering the R-rating. Full frontal nudity of both the male and female variety, and much of the male variety involved erections. But I think it’s because I’m used to an R-rating meaning lots of violence. That’s the American way, right? And there is really very little actual violence in this movie, for all it involves men getting sucked out of their own skins. There’s one really horrible scene at the end–an attempted rape that leads to something even more awful–and the rest of it is disquietingly non-violent and unsexy both. This movie refuses to offer you relief from the horror of what is happening by making it titillating in the slightest.

Continue on if you don’t mind spoilers:

Continue reading “[Movie] Under the Skin”
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[Movie] The Grand Budapest Hotel

As Wes Anderson a movie as was ever Wes Andersoned by Wes Anderson, to be sure. The Grand Budapest Hotel is basically everything I could have wanted it to be and then some. The entire movie feels very carefully unreal, in a way that reminds me of cartoons that are made entirely of cut paper moving in stop motion rather than actual animation. It’s all models and intense colors and confections that look like they ought to be made out of play-do but you know they’ll taste amazing.

And Willem Dafoe with a bulldog underbite.

I think the glue that holds The Grand Budapest Hotel together and makes you believe all the careful fakery is that just before the unreal silliness of it hits the point of twee, something shocking happens. Fingers get chopped off. People get stabbed. Ralph Fiennes suddenly starts cussing a blue streak. And even when it’s not necessarily funny, you can’t help but laugh anyway because it’s just so damn startling.

Also, allow me to share with you my favorite exchange in the entire movie. For context, know that Dmitri is Madame D’s son, and has spent pretty much all of his screen time relentlessly attacking M. Gustave’s sexuality.

Dmitri: If I find out you laid one finger on my mother’s body, living or dead…

M. Gustave: I thought I was a faggot.

Dmitri: [moment of confused silence] You’re bisexual.

I almost snorted iced tea out my nose.

The only thing in the movie I wasn’t really wild about was the three layered narrative. I still don’t get the point of adding the third layer, which we only even see at the beginning and the end of the movie. As it is, you get a bit about the “author,” then the author meeting Mr. Moustafa, and then Mr. Moustafa relating the story to him. I don’t see the necessity of that top layer, unless it was self-consciously to mimic the three-tiered design of the Courtesan au Chocolat confection, which really seems like it’s trying too hard. (Or maybe you could tease something out about looking back into the past and looking back into the past again, but that also seems like trying too hard.)

The story is pretty much as presented in the trailer. I suppose if this movie is about anything, it’s the intrusion of war and death–and reality, really–into this carefully unreal place. It’s funny, but for all the death that occurs in the movie, none of it ever feels real until the end, when suddenly the film goes from bright color to black and white. Maybe it’s even a bit about how people form their own family units. But I think the real point is the hectic, fantastic journey. It was weird and hilarious and I loved it.

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movie

[Movie] 300: Rise of an Empire

300, why can’t I just quit you?

wpid-IMG_20140308_190058_335.jpg
Oh yeah. That’s why.

I can’t help it. It’s full of men with rippling six packs wearing nothing but tiny leather underpants1 and leather skirts with strategic crotch windows of the sort you normally see women wearing in fantasy art. I’M ONLY HUMAN OKAY2.

(light spoilers throughout)

It actually amuses me more than I can say that in this movie, there are two (wow, count ’em, two! we’re moving up in the world of Frank Miller, ladies. And neither of them are strippers!) women with major speaking parts, and both of them spend the entire movie wearing more than the men. Even during the one sex scene, Artemesia comes out wearing more than Themistokles because at least she’s still got her skirt. 300:RoaE feels like even more of a homoerotic ode to speedos than the original while desperately trying to be hyper uber no really believes us please you have to cartoonishly manly. There should be a subtitle that flashes in the lower right hand corner of every scene that says: **No homo. We swear.

In one scene Gorgo tells Themistokles to stop stroking his cock while he’s watching a bunch of Spartans wearing only modesty speedos wrestle. I’m not even joking.

This movie is ridiculous. And it takes itself so very seriously, which just makes it nothing short of hilarious in scenes. 300: RoaE contains probably the greatest hate fuck scene ever put to film. There are entire server farms no doubt devoted entirely to producing the gouts of cartoonish blood that fill the battle scenes, not to mention the horse that Themistokles rides across several ships that are on fire so he can have a massive sword fight with Artemesia.

And I loved Artemesia, even if I really wanted to lick a napkin and scrub some of the eyeliner off her face. She was just the kind of cold queen bitch character that I am helpless against, and what I loved best was she stayed bad until the end. There was no change of heart caused by an encounter with the One True Cock. (I would have thrown things. Seriously.) I almost died giggling when she taunted Themistokles “You fight harder than you fuck!”

I think that’s the reason I keep watching these movies, and damn me, I enjoy them. Despite the fact that even on their face, they are  cringe-inducingly problematic. It’s got all the unsubtle subtext of the original 300, but turned up to 11 just in case you didn’t manage catch it last time. The Greeks throw around the words freedom and democracy more than your average presidential candidate, and the existence of Greek slaves is for the most part carefully skirted around while slavery practiced by the Persians is given plenty of screen time. The “barbarian” bad guys are pretty much all middle-eastern or black, commonly deformed, etc, and there they are facing off against the chiseled jawlines of the Greeks3. There are even fucking suicide bombers in this one. No really. The Greeks make a great caricature of self-consciously hyperpatriotic America, complete with at one point Themistokles (I think it was him) saying that the Persians just want to kill them because FREEDOM.

But godammit, it’s so fucking pretty. It’s kind of like eating that extra large piece of chocolate peanut butter cheesecake that was baked for you by Satan himself, where you know you shouldn’t like it, you know it’s bad for you, and you just can’t help it anyway because at the time it’s just so nummy. Then next thing you know, you’re laying on the bathroom floor with crumbs in your hair and a mouth that tastes like regret, considering if it would just be better to sanitize the plumbing fixtures by setting them on fire, only hopefully you’ll die quietly from your gallbladder strangling your heart before you ever get that far.

There’s going to be a third movie. It’s inevitable. And I predict with advance shame that will see it too, and then have a mouthful of regret that no amount of nicely cut pecs will be able to erase. I can only hope in the next movie, maybe we’ll finally get an answer to the question of why Xerxes has eyebrows like a chola. Probably because he hates freedom.

(See also: io9’s hilarious review)

1 – Oh my god for extra hilarity, if you’re looking at this before this post falls off my blog’s front page check out which slice of the picture WordPress chose to represent the post. JUST LOOK AT IT. I did not pick that. Sometimes perfection just happens on its own.

2 – Just in case someone out there wants to leap on the fact that I have tacitly admitted that I am an actual human being capable of prurient interest in swathes of rippling man-flesh, I would like to note two important points:

  1. I would never in a million years advocate putting the above image or anything like it on the cover of the magazine of a professional organization of which I’m part.
  2. I would not use the phrase “rippling man flesh” or anything like it in such a venue either, because that would be super creepy. As a real-life grown-up, I know there is a time and a place for rippling man-flesh, and that normally involves my blog and a beer.

3 – There is a very token effort to humanize the Persians in this one. You see Xerxes’s grief over the death of his father, which apparently is what caused him to go soak in a mystical pool filled with a combination of nair and miracle-gro. You also find out that envoy that Leonidas killed at the beginning of the first 300 was actually the man who rescued Artemesia from death and raised her.

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movie

[Movie] Non-Stop

Maybe this is just a combination of nostalgia and confirmation bias talking,but I could have sworn that back in the misty past, Liam Neeson didn’t spend most of his time on screen killing people. I feel like one day, he gained just a couple more gray hairs and little crows feet and that set off some computer in a secret bunker whose only job is to compute cragginess algorithms, indicating the moment when an actor becomes perfect for Male Baby Boomer Action Hero Wish Fulfillment.

I was only thinking about this because Liam Neeson’s looking particularly craggy and done with everything for Non-Stop. Which I’ll admit, Mike and I saw this weekend because there was literally nothing else both of us were interested in seeing at the theater. I like a good popcorn action with a bit of suspense flick as much as the next guy, when the next guy is Mike.

I actually liked Non-Stop a lot more than I thought I would. I came in just not taking any of it at all seriously–come on, Liam Neeson shoots people on an airplane, how fucking serious can this be?–and actually got very drawn in at the beginning. The film feels very gritty and claustrophobic thanks to the camera work, which I think helps it feel more serious than it has any right to be. I mean come on, the basic concept is that Bill (Liam Neeson) is on a flight where a mysterious person threatens to kill a passenger every twenty minutes if he or she isn’t given a bunch of money. And the hell of it is, it actually kind of works in the sense of convincing you to just give it a whirl and suspend your disbelief…until the last thirty minutes crosses the line of Too Damn Silly.

Eh, and I’m going to just hit some spoilers now, so consider yourself warned.

Continue reading “[Movie] Non-Stop”
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Pompeii: Deadly Weaksauce Eruption Destroys City

Well, I did it, you bastards. I saw Pompeii. Sorry that it took me 24 hours to get my write-up done, things were kind of busy today.

So this is the thing. I went into this movie expecting to be incredibly annoyed by the geology. But actually, the geology wasn’t that bad. There were volcanic bombs when there shouldn’t have been, there was a pyroclastic flow that apparently put on the brakes just for the purposes of barfalicious romance dialog, and there was an overly large tsunami. But that stuff, I can put down to dramatic license; it’s nowhere near Dante’s Peak, let alone The Core levels of badness.

What actually really ticked me off about this movie, far beyond the utterly tepid romance plotline that almost made all of the googly eyes in 47 Ronin look like a great love story and the mustache-twirling stylings of Senator Weaksauce Villainus Pantsius was the way it so blatantly and desperately tried to rip Gladiator off.

Do not fuck with Gladiator.

There was actually a gladiatorial battle scene in Pompeii that lurched along all the same beats as the reenactment of the Battle of Zama scene from Gladiator, down to the bit where the smarmy antagonist observes that he doesn’t recall the Romans losing the battle. But the reason that scene was so fucking badass in Gladiator was because Maximus just takes control of his fellow slaves as a general and uses Roman tactics to win.

Oh yeah. That’s the stuff.

Pompeii didn’t have any of the requisite badassery, and the main character was no fucking Maximus Decimus Meridius. And there was absolutely no good reason for the slaves designated as the losing team to win other than oh the script says we’re awesome so we’ll just like…shove people a bunch until Milo can use his magical Celt horse powers and stuff.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Warning: Spoilers. Like you give a fuck.

Continue reading “Pompeii: Deadly Weaksauce Eruption Destroys City”