Glorious and Bastardly!

But fear not, anyone who for some reason felt sorry for me that my last post was about seeing Gamer, for the very next day I got to see a good movie! And, as the title would imply, it was, in fact, Inglourious Basterds, which was just as much fun to watch as it is to spell all artsy and/or incorrectly.

As is usually the problem with my blog, there’s not much to say about the movie that hasn’t already been said in the few weeks since it came out, or that people would really go running to my blog to read up my specific review about the movie, but Inglourious Basterds is so much fun that you feel compelled to describe just how awesome it is anyway. So much is going on in this movie that even though it’s nearly three hours long (which, I might add, is fairly tricky to fit into a college schedule), there is quite literally never a dull moment. It jumps around from comedy and cheese (being a WWII spaghetti western) to genuinely poignant and beautiful tragedy, both of which strictly stick to their own narratives, the Jewish-American take-no-prisoners Inglourious Basterds and Shosanna, sole survivor of her Jewish family’s massacre, respectively, and the movie juggles both beautifully. Following the Basterds is about as fun and hilarious as a WWII movie can get, not to mention completely ridiculous, as a scene with them will suddenly go from a funny whilst unsettling interrogation to a hard rock guitar riff lead-in to Samuel L Jackson narrating a character’s back-story completely out of nowhere. On the other hand, Shosanna’s story works in a completely different direction, going for the moving narrative. While the Basterds tend to frolic about and raise hell, Shosanna deals with her tragic past as an opportunity for the greatest possible extent for revenge presents itself.

Although I wasn’t too crazy about how the film ended without either narrative actually meeting the other, rather just running up against each other for extreme overkill, the sole element tying the two together, aside from what’s ultimately a common goal, is Nazi Standartenführer Hans Landa a.k.a. “The Jew Hunter” a.k.a. thebestcharacterinanymovieeverohmygoodnessgracious. The movie’s main antagonist, simultaneously single-minded and multifaceted, deadly and goofy, and sadistic and charming, is acted by Christoph Waltz, who plays the uber-nuanced character to perfection. While saying that his character “makes” the movie is a bit much, he is essential to just how good it is.

So although the ending (spoiler) isn’t quite as good as I’d have hoped, since, like I mentioned before, it feels like the two narratives don’t actually meet up, and also because of its firm location in alternative history, given how the movie basically ends with Hitler being riddled by machine guns and then exploding, which by itself is a little hard to swallow that the security would actually be that bad, but I’m also iffy about it just because I’m iffy about alternative history, so your mileage will vary at the ending.

Aside from that, though, the movie is entertaining and deep with hilarious and nuanced characters that never stop to surprise you. Except Brad Pitt’s character. He’s just silly.

And It Actually Was Seven Bucks

As it just so happened to work out, a few days ago there was a new Strong Bad email on Homestar Runner that contained the phrase “This suckquake of a movie is a complete wastenado of my seven bucksonsoon.” I thought this was hilarious, and wondered if I would get the opportunity to use it anytime soon.

Enter Gamer.

The basic concept is that bad fake science is used to make two video games where a person literally controls the actions of another real person, in a The Sims meets worldwide orgy game Society and a shooter game called Slayers, both of which are somehow endorsed by the government, although the not-so subtext more or less spells it out for you that the man in charge of the company behind these games is actually THE BAD GUY and actually controls just about everyone! Who saw that coming?

Nothing in this movie makes any sense. The world rallies around the main character Kable (whose real name is something else I can’t be bothered to Google) for his unprecedented success on Slayers, as he nears the number of rounds needed to earn freedom, even though, if anyone in the audience stops for three seconds to think about it, it really all comes down to the guy who’s playing him (another name I’m not Googling), who more or less gets pushed out of the spotlight and his importance ignored, but he’s an irritating little self-proclaimed BAMF about as unlikeable as the hundreds of “please silence your cell phones” spots they play before the movie starts, so it could be worse. But of course, it is worse. The acting and the script are in constant competition to see which can be worse, with the semi-exception of Michael C Hall playing the villain, although his character is so grating and nonsensical that he’s only barely the most interesting person on the screen.

There are so many things I could say to stress my point that Gamer is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, but really, all I have to do is mention that after the hour of almost constant shoot-’em-up mixed with fat people doing fat people things while controlling sexy people doing sexy people things, the movie’s grand climax is Gerard Butler beating up people performing a dance number while Michael C Hall sings along, and then gets talked into stabbing himself.

You just can’t make up crap that bad. Except someone actually did.

Liquid Luck? Liquid Awesome!

Firstly, sorry about not updating in about a week. My internet’s been dead for the past three days, which really isn’t a terrible thing, I’m a little behind on webcomics and facebook, but nowadays this is kind of a killer because, suddenly, twitterfox flips out and goes “Holy Cow, man! You have 200 tweets!” So, again, Twitter is a mixed blessing argument goes here.

Secondly, I meant to write about the new Harry Potter movie, having seen it on opening day, so it’s a little late, but… I’m gonna do it anyway! Now, being a total Potter nut, this post could go one of two ways. Namely, I could write about how much I loved the movie while rattling off all kinds of things I didn’t like about it in a sort of “review”, but that feels kind of pointless, in all honesty. Alternatively, I could write a post more focused on how because of the way the script was written, what complications that makes for the uber-detailed Deathly Hollows. In actuality though, I’m going to do both of these anyway, cuz I can’t help it.

If you haven’t seen Half-Blood Prince yet, you’re either A) going to see it, B) insane, or C) extra insane. Seriously, even the Vatican gave this movie the thumbs up. Granted, their reasons might have been for the good versus evil messages and not quite so much the  way the wonderfully dark story plays with the comic touches of the film’s emerging love triangles acted out with increasing brilliance from (most of) the cast, but it’s almost a spiritual requirement now!

Almost. Wonderful as the movie is, I’m picky enough to have a few gripes anyway. Obviously, the movie’s plot has to be cut down a little bit from the book, but given the overwhelming task of finding and destroying the horcruxes left at the end of it, a little help left out would probably have been appreciated. The only information supplied to Harry in the book about the remaining horcruxes bothered me a few years ago when I first read the book, because it barely seemed like any information to go off of, but in the movie, none of the clues are presented at all. Harry and the viewer are given no hints as to the three remaining horcruxes, and that might be a bit of a mess to straighten out in the next movie. A lot of Voldemort’s backstory is absent as well, which both confuses some of the efforts to find the horcruxes and just to learn about his lineage and such. Although, really, that’s about it. I have surprisingly few complaints about what was cut from the movie, which I certainly haven’t said about a Potter film for a while.

Like I said earlier, the acting in this series only gets better and better. Radcliffe and co. make the characters so very believable and actually made the vast multitude of this entry’s sudden romance enjoyable (which I honestly worried would just come off as nauseating, so that was a nice surprise). Only Bonnie Wright’s Ginny Weasley really fails to pull off her new role as a love interest, although to be fair, I never really got into the whole Ginny as Harry’s love interest bit in the first place, nor do I particularly like Wright’s Ginny either, but that’s just my bias.

But by far my biggest complaint about the movie is the added scene not originally from the book where Death Eaters attack the Burrow, because it is stupid. It adds nothing to the narrative, and makes shoe tying far more awkward and uncomfortable than I could possibly have imagined it getting. Given what was left out of the movie in the first place, adding a completely pointless scene that wasn’t even in the book feels, to quote Harry on Felix Felicis, is counter-productive.

But, again, like I’ve said here and on my blog in the past, I’m just a harsh critic. The movie is wonderful despite whatever petty complaint I feel I have to express. The film’s comedic timing and powerful sense of tragedy is a sight to see, and I can only hope the two parts of the Deathly Hollows films can end the series with an equal amount of brilliance.

Whoever Comes Up With The Best Name For This Post Doesn’t Win a Free iPhone!

Well, kids, my laptop finally came yesterday, and I’m toying the idea with writing a post about it since it’s a popular-ish model (Dell Studio 15), but I haven’t really used it for anything since I’m still waiting for someone who understands our secure wireless network to hook me up (figuratively) so I can do anything with it, so, yeah, no real news yet on that front! In other news, I’ve been kind of busy/not feeling like blogging, and I don’t really have much to say today either, but I’m trying to update more frequently and my short story’s been sitting on top of the blog since Monday, so I’ll work on a few tidbits for you guys.

I saw Public Enemies last night – Seriously, I was invited to a 10:10 showing. Man, haven’t seen a theater that empty since opening day for Land of the Lost. Zing. – and walked into the theater realizing that I actually had no idea what the movie was about, which is something I haven’t done in a while. Usually I know quite a bit about a movie if I’m going to the theater to see it, but I didn’t even know what the topic was, and I was just tired enough to revel in the modern, diluted sense of discovery, which was soon paid off handsomely as it is a movie about bank robbers, which, just in case you didn’t know, are easily the coolest kinds of robbers. It’s a very good movie, and it definitely keeps your attention throughout the whole thing. Johnny Depp’s acting is, per usual, brilliant, as was Marion Cotillard, although Christian Bale didn’t seem particularly into it. Also, since I can get away with making any kind of stupid complaint as long as I make it clear I actually like the movie, what should be the movie’s climax feels far more like a drawn out denoument, and, and this is easily the strangest complaint I think I’ll ever make about a movie, the cinematography and lighting seemed kind of unusual. Yep, that’s right internet, I just called a movie out on  cinematography! Look out, Rotten Tomatoes!

I’m not really sure why I get so interested whenever a new Final Fantasy game is released, since the only games I really liked in the series are the first one and the Tactics spin-offs, and I haven’t played any installments dated later than III. Still, I was kind of interested in the news about a new DS-exclusive Final Fantasy, until I read some of the actual details about it and realized it was pretty much the most underwhelming video game announcement I’ve ever read. For example, here’s a snippet of IGN’s summary of what we know about the plot:

“… you play as Brand, a character who’s just come of age and heads off to the castle to meet the king. There, he learns that the king’s daughter has been kidnapped by the Witch of the North, and he’s tasked with saving her.”

No. Way. That’s only the plot of every other fantasy ever made. I’m not talking about Final Fantasy, mind you, I’m talking about the genre. Don’t worry, it gets better:

“Going further in depth on the story, the magazine also got commentary from director Takashi Tokita, who said that the game’s theme is about the travels of an adventure”.

Uh huh. The theme of a video game is adventure… Groundbreaking!

“The game makes use of a turn-based battle system, requiring that players simply select a command … To execute cure and other spells, you simply touch one of these panels.”

“As one would expect of a classic RPG experience, this means random battles…”

Did this really need to be a four page magazine article? Is there anything this game does that RPGs haven’t been doing since the dawn of time? Oh, it’s probably too early to tell, certainly, but based on this “news”, for a game whose “overall goal … appears to be to fuse classic RPG gaming with the more modern tech offered by the DS”… how is this not just more of the same?

And just in case this post isn’t unfocused and helter skelter enough, I found this a few days ago and now understand why A Cappella is so damn popular.

Not The Worst Hangover Ever

Honestly, I fully expected to hate The Hangover, but it was actually pretty funny.

That’s about it. It’s as simple as that. It’s not like the movie is a great advance in the art of comedic film, but it definitely knew how to do it right. The basic premise is simple enough (guys in Vegas can’t remember what happened last night and hilarity ensues/ed),  but where it exceeds is how it takes takes that simplicity, complicates it, and runs with it. Being a writer, simply watching a movie that will throw a tiger in a bathroom at you one minute and then a valet returning with a cop car the next all with an increasingly complicated and hopefully upcoming explanation of how they got there in the first place was fun for me simply by wondering how they wrote the script and kept track of it all. Amazingly enough, it did. Somehow the movie actually does manage to explain itself by the end, taking the viewer through an increasingly absurd aftermath of a forgotten night out, jumping back and forth between humor you laugh through and humor you cringe through. Very rarely do the mostly unlikeable characters actually provide any of the humor (intentionally), as most of the laughs are simply provided by the situation, which, as it tends to be pointed out by the more unfortunate characters, really wouldn’t be very funny at all. The Hangover basically becomes the ultimate in schadenfreude: the absurd consquences (causes largely unknown, yet reasonably assumingly deserved) are really only funny because someone else has to deal with them.

While the movie doesn’t really make any kind of moral clear, as it kind of continuously skips back and forth between “drinking and partying is wrong” and “…but you can get away with it”, it illustrates the consequences quite vividly for the sole purpose of pointing and laughing at them, and definitely not with them.

Aaand can’t think of anything else to say. Not feeling super funny today. Know what is though? The Hangover. Better than the real thing.

My Review of Land of the Oh Dear God Somebody Please Kill Me

When I somewhat unexpectedly went to see Land of the Lost yesterday, the theater was having a little trouble during the preview reel. The sound cut out at random intervals through about half of the trailer for Year One, and another camera was projecting the theater’s logo onto the screen in addition to what we were supposed to be watching. When that trailer ended, so did the technical difficulties, and I thought “Good thing that’s done. It would have sucked if that kept happening through the movie.”

As it turns out, Land of the Lost didn’t need any help doing that.

To give you a general idea of just how bad this movie was, my rough draft for this post simply read “The Land of the Lost is a terrible movie”, which was quickly followed by my second rough draft, “Land of the Lost is the worst thing I’ve seen in a theater since Mike Myers raped The Cat in the Hat.” I’m more or less at a loss for words to convey just how much nobody should ever, ever, see this movie.

Except it’s definitely “less”.

I know absolutely nothing about the original tv show that inspired this movie, but all I can say is that I hope to God it was nowhere near as bad as this movie was. I don’t know anything about the original show’s story, but as far as this movie goes, it’s one of the most predictable, cliched, and hackneyed bits of rubbish I’ve ever sat through an excruciating hour and 41 minutes of. Will Ferrell plays the down on his luck egomaniac and all-around exorbitantly unlikable asshole Dr. Rick Marshall, who has obligatory self-doubt, self-loathing, and eating issues, angry not at his completely deserving self, but at the world for making him a laughing stock scientist Steven Hawking has ridiculed. Despite this, Rick seems perfectly content to sit back and give up until Anna Friel’s  Holly Cantrell shows up and rather nonsensically sciences him back into the world.

And, oh, Holly Cantrell, I have a few words for you too.

What does it say about a movie when its only female character comes equipped with enough short shorts, boob grabs, and “you might get wet” jokes to make any given redneck cringe, yet still serves as the straight man to Will Ferrell and the other monkeys’ (one of which, somewhat literally) antics, complete with an inexplicable ability to translate ancient monkey-man to English and vice-versa, yet still serves as an even more inexplicable, and frankly unconditional, love interest for Will Ferrell? Well, my friends, it says quite a lot. Land of the Lost is hands down the most unapologetically sexist movie I imagine can possibly exist outside of pornography. The only other female characters seen in the entire movie are a group of half-naked cavewomen (and just in case you’re thinking it, GOOD GOD NO IT IS NOT WORTH SITTING THROUGH THE REST OF THE MOVIE FOR) who immediately throw themselves at trailer-trash Will (Danny R. McBride), who earlier in the movie described building himself a casino/hotel castle, one of the pillars of which he would live at the top “with a mate”, and sentence her to the other pillar top as his “prisoner/slave” (or some bullshit like that).

Really, the rampant sexism in Land of the Lost is absolutely revolting, and it’s amazing that that’s what got me to say the word “revolting” first, as opposed to the rest of the movie’s gross-out humor and toilet humor and lizard-men getting it on humor. The movie has almost as much dinosaur excrement (of all varieties) as it does character development, and for anyone queasy around blood, there’s a scene where a mosquito defies all laws of physics and drains way more than enough blood from Will Ferrell to kill him, defying any and all science, although if you’ve read this much of my rant and you still need the warning about that, something is wrong with you.

I’m honestly at a loss to think of a single thing this movie did right. The plot is a joke, the characters are detestable, the comedy is nonexistent, and the obligatory inspirational message is tacked-on and would probably be the only thing that’s funny about the movie if only the rest of the movie wasn’t something you’d cry for mercy through, wondering what you possibly could have done for karma to hate you so much to bring you this worthless, moronic, sexist, homophobic cesspool of an inexcusably bastardized movie.

So Has Anyone Titled An Up Review “Two Thumbs UP!” Yet?

I’m going to start things a little differently this time around and instead of reviewing the movie, initially, I’m going to review Armond White’s negative review of Pixar’s newest movie, Up:

Up’s uninteresting story of an old widower who attaches his home to helium balloons and floats off to Venezuela with an overeager kid in tow follows the same formula as the previous nine Pixar movies.  But artistic standards get trumped by a special feature: sentimentality. Pixar’s price sticker includes enough saccharine emotion to distract some viewers from being more demanding; they don’t mind the blatant narrative manipulation of a sad old man and lonely little boy. They buy animation to extend their childhood like men who buy cars for phallic symbols.

First things first, I’m having a hard time seeing just what he’s complaining about. On the one hand, I don’t think it’s too much to call what’s ultimately a kid’s movie “formulaic”, but saying that Up follows “the same formula as the previous nine Pixar movies” is much harder to buy. Try comparing Up to Finding Nemo or even last year’s Wall-e, and aside from a happy ending, there’s really not much to compare. I can say that Up was a fantastic movie, which it was, but that I didn’t like it as much as Wall-e, which I didn’t, which I’d have a hard time putting in Pixar’s Top Five, which I did, but does that really mean anything? Comparing Pixar movies has nearly become comparing apples to oranges. Each one strives for its own identity, from the pseudo-coming-of-age Toy Story to the mid-life and identity crises of The Incredibles to the intensely character driven commentary on the human condition of Wall-e, and now Up strives for a simplistic, emotional rekindling. Not, say, buying giant phallical overcompensating cars, like our apparently professional critic seems to have gotten out of the movie.

Even the montage showing Carl’s marriage to childhood sweetheart Ellie (their wedding, companionship, childlessness, then Ellie’s illness and death), is over-sentimentalized. This silent interlude is no more daring than the utterly conventional Wall-E: It concludes with Carl, alone, holding a blue balloon at Ellie’s funeral. Sheesh. Although Chaplinesque music underscores these maudlin scenes, they’re not emotionally pure like Chaplin; they preen. Critics who forget that movies should be about people defend this reduction of human experience.

Ignoring the labelling of Wall-e as, of all things, conventional (wtf?), after seeing the movie and reading this paragraph, I’d like to know what crawled up this critic’s ass and died. Granted, I didn’t really find the opening montage quite as heartbreaking as hyped, but I certainly haven’t dismissed it as “over-sentimentalized”, “conventional”, and “maudlin”. Then this critic goes so far as to declare that “Critics who forget that movies should be about people defend this reduction of human experience”, essentially attacking anyone who disagrees with him as an idiot, when instead all signs just point to him being a caustic, insensitive narcissist attempting a frilly, esoteric denouncement of an otherwise instantly lovable film, or, in so many words, a crab ass. Really, if your first reaction to the newly isolated Carl holding a blue balloon at his wife’s funeral is “Sheesh”, something is wrong with you.

When Up trivializes Carl and Russell’s loneliness—treating it to the same Journey/Rescue/Return blueprint as Finding Nemo, Cars, Wall-E, Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 1 and 2—the predictability becomes cloying. And the inevitable shift to anthropomorphism—Carl and Russell float to South America, encountering a prehistoric bird and mysteriously “talking” dogs—is very nearly depressing. Almost as depressing as Wall-E. Despite some imaginative imagery (gray-blue night storms, dark yet vivid jungle scenes, compositional values J.J. Abrams knows nothing about), Up drops its emotional elements for chase mechanics and precious comedy. This way, Pixar disgraces and delimits the animated film as a mushy, silly pop form.

Really. Out of every attack White could have made against Pixar, he decided to accuse them of “disgrac[ing] and delimit[ing] the animated film as a mushy, silly pop form”. Man, I’d hate to read any of his Dreamworks reviews, in that case! If Pixar is such anathema in his eyes, anything else must be Satanic.

But, really, enough with Mr. Hardass “Real Film Critics Hate Movies!”. See this movie. It’s brilliant.

Oh No! Nostalgia!

This had better not suck.

And I’m working on my Up review right now.

No Matter What, a Better Name For This Post Is “Wait, Why Did I Go See Night at the Museum 2?”

Probably not the movie review you were expecting, but I don’t see Up for another hour, so I’m gonna jot this one down real quickly.

Basically, Night at the Museum 2 is exactly what I was expecting, except when I’ve told people that, they asked what I meant, so I probably can’t just assume that makes sense without this bare minimum context:  we saw it with one of my friends who hadn’t seen the  first movie, which we then realized we were able to sum up with “There’s an Egyptian tablet that makes everything in the museum come to life” and “Teddy Roosevelt and Sacajawea hooked up in the first movie”.

It’s a fun enough movie, but it’s obviously not deep or anything. It’s loaded with lengthy, fast-paced dialogues that are probably supposed to be witty, but generally pull it off anyway and only feel like they get to be a bit much a handful of times. There’s enough cameos and artsy references to please any type of person seeing the movie, from those people who want to see a tiny, Western Owen Wilson to those people who want to see Ben Stiller take the soldier’s place in that WWI photo that probably has a name, but I’m too rushed right now to google it. Extra credit if you do it for me.

It’s not really the kind of movie you can make terribly serious complaints about, like obviously it’s going to try to cram in too many jokes that aren’t really funny and the story isn’t going to be the most surprising thing you’ve ever seen. Really, about all I can get away with railing on is probably that Amelia Earhart was way too obnoxously kitschy and the ending battle made absolutely no sense, since the giant Abraham Lincoln owned the undead eagle army of death thing, all dispersed, and then we had another, unnecessary fight scene (spoiler).

But again, if you really care that much about the holes in the plot and over/underacted characters, then why would you even consider seeing this movie? If you just want a fun, stupid movie, go check it out.

Obligatory “I Watched The Watchmen” Joke Goes Here

Hey, you know how I said I’d do a real post over the weekend? Well, I’m counting this as that weekend, this way I don’t have to admit I lied.

So I haven’t read the Watchmen novel yet, but I saw the movie yesterday, and I have absolutely no idea what I think about it. You might be asking yourself why I’m reviewing it right now then, and my response would have to be “That’s a very good question.” Surprisingly enough, it’s pretty tricky to review a movie when your first reaction coming out of it is “Well, I need to read the source material.” I can see how the story could be really good, but the movie feels more like lots of potential that never fully pays off.

My friends who have read Watchmen had reactions along the lines of:

• It was enjoyable.
• I loved most of it.
• They focused more on making a film than making the message.

And reactions from my friends who haven’t have been along the lines of:

• What the hell is that blue animal thing?
• PUT ON PANTS!

So short of the subsequent cringing from the people I saw it with (which was hilarious, not gonna lie), for the most part, I liked it, but it’s not one of the best things I’ve seen. Going back to my friends’ impression that they put more effort into making a film than making the message, I’m only guessing, but I can see how he’d be right. The movie doesn’t really seem to be doing a whole lot, short of depressing the viewer with the thought of nuclear armageddon, until the ending. And this brings me to my main criticism with the movie. It’s incredibly slow. For a nearly three hour movie that’s half fight scene, it’s amazing how much this drags on and on. So much detail is given to the characters and their stories that the actual events of the movie are muted to the point where I had barely any idea what the characters were actually trying to do when the movie climaxed.

And there’s the obvious potential criticism if this sort of thing bothers you, and possibly even if it doesn’t. This movie is excessively violent. I’ll admit I’m rarely a fan of crazy violent stuff, but I’ll be fine with it, but this movie pushes that to the limit. More bones get broken in this movie than there are people in Nebraska, and there’s still more people who wind up as pools of blood, evaporated, or both. Simultaneously. Somehow. And there’s a scene with a meat cleaver and a person’s head (not to spoil anything) that gets pretty excessive. Even if you’re perfectly okay with the extent of the violence this movie reaches, you’ll have to admit it’s pretty silly.

And for an excessively nit-picky complaint, I don’t get how Silk Spectre II counts as a “mask” if she doesn’t… you know… wear a mask.

Overall, I’d say the movie’s worth seeing, but I’m hard pressed to come up with what I actually like about it that, from what I’ve heard, isn’t as prevalent as in the original novel. Which I need to go read now. And I think that’s how I’m going to end this review. Even though I haven’t, go read the book. Clearly that’s what you need to do.