Let's Movie Review! ^_________^

I've spent many an hour in the local cinema during the past weeks, allow me to share some of my thoughts with you.

Bolt3D ***½

Saw this right after coming to New Zealand, and incidentally, it was the first movie I've seen through a pair of polarizing glasses, which might explain perhaps ½ a star in the rating. I was surprised by it. It is actually a very nice movie, even if the storyline doesn't step away from the well-tread path set by a million stories told before it. It's really not that simple to make humor that is funny for both kids and the adults, but I think Bolt succeeded in it. I even liked the hamster-in-a-ball that some have complained about. (Yay for being in an English-speaking country and the chronic lack of the ever-so-high-quality Finnish dubbing.)

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans **

I give it two stars instead of one, because the guy playing the vampire elder really did a fantastic job in portraying his role. The werewolf dude (it's been a few weeks, forgot all names already) wasn't bad either, but the overall blandness of the movie makes his role quite forgettable. The vampire girl, on the other hand, holy fuck! Talk about a mess.. She was like Gollum, her moods swinging wildly between super-angsty and a princess-shaped paperweight every time the camera cut angles. And there were a lot of cuts. (And weird camera angles. Half the time you don't know if you are looking at the ceiling or the floor of the particular cave the scene is taking place in.) Was it the first Jason Bourne movie, the Bourne Identity, that started it all? That was a good movie, but the assholes who made it, should be skinned alive for killing off the whole fucking action genre and replacing it with the strobo shows that we are being fed these days. Fuck me, even the latest Bond movie would have been tolerable, had the action scenes been properly made! (I'm also heretic enough to call the reboot of the Batman series only a partial success because of this very thing.) Shaky camera and MTV-editing are to the action movies, what all the flicks ending with the word "Movie" are for comedies.

Well, there is some gore in it, and vampires can never be a total waste of time.

Watchmen ****½

(admit it, you clicked that hoping for something big and blue to pop out. Instead, I give you something even better!)

Yea, it's a good movie, a very good movie. Of course it's not exactly like the comic with all the philosophical nyances and whatnot jammed in there, but anyone who thinks that it fails because of that, can cry themselves to sleep until old age and dementia wash away the scars for all I care. Few things that bothered me -- that I can think of off the top of my head -- were that Nite Owl and Silk Spectre (II) were displayed as such brutal little sonuvabitches in a fight that it really took a lot of the impact off of Rorschach's and Comedian's roles. And Nite Owl was supposed to be a middle-aged everyday normal guy, not the kind of semi-beefcake the actor was (the whole manhood-in-costume angle was very well displayed, though, I thought). Oh yes, and the ending... I actually liked this new one over the comic's squid one. It has a different weight to it, but the wrath of an angry god works just the same as an unknown alien thread for me -- it's just that after all the violence in the movie the whole destruction of the city scene was a huge cop-out. It really would have added some much-needed effect to it to show the bloody corpses piled up on top of each other everywhere instead of yet another CGI explosion. :(

Anyway, this movie has been talked to death, and most people have probably seen it already, and for those who haven't, you can come over to my house later and we can watch it together after I buy the bluray, if you bring the beer.


--Intermission--


I was in a cafeteria today, sipping on a vanilla cappuccino the size of an olympic swimming pool, and writing some stuff on my laptop, when all of sudden two girls sit to the table next to me.

And proceed to speak in Finnish.

I got a rare opportunity right there to find out, what it is that women speak, when they think that there is no one listening/understanding them.

It's like guys usually assume it is, they speak of dicks.

And apparently not necessarily of dicks that are attached to a member of the human species.

Oh, weaker sex, you never cease to amaze and mildy disgust me. :)


--And now for the latter part of our reviews--


Transporter 3 *½

For the sake of everything that is still good in this world:

Jason Statham.

Start paying more attention to the movies you are making than you do to level-upping your chest muscles. You are already quite large enough. Every time you take your shirt off on screen, I can hear the women in the theater going cuu-ee and slipping off their seats on their own juices.

Statham has been the leading mug of many a fine picture already, including one of the last year's shiniest cinematic gems: Death Race. The previous two Transporter movies were also pretty good, or at least damn fine entertainment, but this time around I felt like leaving half-way through. Transporter 3 is just a lazy movie. The shoddy camera and editing work is there, like can be expected, but the story, as trivial as it can be in movies like these, just felt too poor even for an excuse to drive cars around really fast.

Luc Besson is credited as having written the script... I really don't want to diss the creative mind behind Léon and The Fifth Element, but this guy is sinking rapidly towards the bottom of the George Lucas Trench in the Ocean of Shit, like some perverse cosplay of Le Grand bleu. Has he really done anything worthwhile since Danny the Dog/Unleashed? I'd rather see him retire, while I can still muster some warm feelings towards his long career...

As for Statham, I really hope this won't become a norm for him. He has the right stuff to become Bruce Willis of the 21st century.

(Incidentally, the NZ guys in the theater needed a change of underwear after every time a shiny German car came rrrrroaring to the screen with its hard-as-steel engine trembling and pulsating with barely-contained power that...oh hell, you get the picture...)


Monsters vs. Aliens ***

I just saw this one tonight, again in 3D, and again, just like with Bolt, I have to say I was really surprised at how much I liked it, since the trailers I had seen before were more cringe-inducing than anything else. Again, the main parts of the storyline aren't going anywhere unheard of, it's just another try on the friends-with-special-powers-take-on-a-super-villain-and-win-because-they-are-not-the-bad-guys. It is acceptable as a one-shot, but if Dreamworks will start churning out sequels like they did with Shrek, I'm going to hire a hobo to urinate into the gas tank of their CEO's SUV.

The humor in the movie is reminiscent of the said Shrek flicks, which is entirely a good thing. It's nice to have two large animation studios with slightly different ideas on what makes a funny. I saw Pixar's Wall-E before leaving Finland, and it was a great movie as well, but in a thoroughly nice way, whereas Dreamworks executives seem to think that it is okay to blow a million or two on a fart joke every now and then. I agree with them wholeheartedly.

The thing that I found most impressive in Monsters vs. Aliens was the quality of the animation itself at parts. Most backgrounds and many of the (even main) characters were overly cartoony and simple, but when something was well done, it was like the pixels were fellating my eyeballs. The destruction and mayhem of the action scenes, water, cloth simulation, particle effects, all very much top notch. It's almost depressing, really, as I like toying with 3D-modelling myself, and these days the professional-level CGI is more than just a bit ahead of what a twerp like me can accomplish with a copy of Blender. In short: effects and overall animation - a slight improvement on what they've done before; characters - a loo-ong step backwards from the vivid personas we saw in the Shrek movies; story - it will be the first thing I'll forget about the movie, maybe as soon as tomorrow; humor - I laughed several times.

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Alright, let's leave it at that for now. Later this week I will witness the live action horror that is Dragonball Evolution. Really looking forward to it, I have a gut feeling it will be like the unholy union of Karate Kid and Mortal Kombat 2(the movie). :)

Coming up later on:
The new Star Trek movie with Sylar as Spock.
The new Fast and Furious movie, because I hate cars, pointless drama in action movies and I really hate cars.
The new X-Men movie, because Wolverine is like the only interesting character so far in the motion picture versions of the comics, though I have hopes for Gambit in this one.
Terminator Salvation, because I can't come up with a reason to not see it.
Transformers 2, because you can only go up from the atrocious first one.
Heh, maybe even Night at the Museum 2, because ... well, I might be bored enough to see it someday.

Did you notice that all of those movies are sequels? Fuck you Hollywood.

Did you also notice that I'm not seeing movies like Slumdog Millionare, Che, The Wrestler or Gran Torino? Fuck you art fags, I'm seeing movies for entertainment, not to become depressed.