a blog about movies...
When I came home last night and logged into Facebook, I noticed that the opinions on The Dark Knight Rises were rather polarizing. I saw everything from calling it “remarkable” to saying that it was a “90s cop drama with a Batman cameo.” Frankly, I was pretty surprised, but should I be? I mean, we now live in a world where if something doesn’t go the way you want it to, it’s bad. I don’t know what the deal is. I loved it.
Ridley Scott’s new prequel to the Alien franchise, Prometheus, may not be what you were expecting. I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing. What I am saying is that you may want to clear your expectations off of the shelf before you take a seat at your local theater.
After seeing the trailer, I expected an intense and possibly horrifying look at the events leading to Alien, also directed by Scott. I was partly right. While Prometheus doesn’t really play into the horrific feeling of Alien, it does offer a substantial amount of intensity. Mostly. Prometheus is not a white-knuckle movie. It may not keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time, but it will force you to creep forward more than once.
Keeping with the overtly sexual art of H.R. Giger, the movie is quite stunning to look at. The movie seems to put on display just how sexual these creatures are in the form of phallic and vaginal representations. But after having seen the previous movies, did you expect less?
The story overall doesn’t explain a whole lot. It poses so many questions that in the two and a half hours it was on screen, it couldn’t even begin to answer all of them. The thing is, that’s not such bad thing, and I’ll get to that in a minute.
I was mostly impressed with the cast. I liked that they kept the central character a woman, just as they did in years previous. Elizabeth Shaw, played by Noomi Rapace, was very Ripley-esque. Guy Pearce, for his small roll as Peter Weyland, did a fine job for what he was given. Michael Fassbender, who played the emotionally devoid synthetic David, was terrific. Frankly, he was unnerving.
Now, I say mostly impressed with the cast because of Charlize Theron. By no means did she do a poor job. I just expect a lot from her and I feel she didn’t really push herself with this one.
There has always been an unspoken rule that we as an audience are to suspend a certain amount of belief so that a movie can progress. The thing is, that can only go so far. There will come a point in Prometheus, and I’m not going to tell you what that part is because it’s crucial, that they cross the threshold into a realm where the audience will question its validity. It goes from being a sci-fi to a medical masquerade.
I expected a clear and succinct ending. This goes back to what I was talking about before with the questions. Prometheus leaves itself open for one or what could be two more movies. It asks all of these questions, but we still have time to have them answered. More or less, Prometheus acted as what could be considered an expository episode in a much larger saga.
-Nick
“Wow, he just made the international sign of the doughnut.”
Most of us can pinpoint when a movie has been done before. Some ideas never die and they persist for years and years. We’ve seen the end of the world by zombies and robots. We’ve seen the girl get the guy. And we’ve seen people switching bodies. Those movies aren’t going away, but is that really a bad thing?
The Change-Up was one of those movies. And I knew that, just like everyone else, going into the theater. But that didn’t matter to me. And the thing is, I can’t really figure out why. Frankly, I don’t care why. The cast was awesome and the movie was a great.
But why was it great? It’s because Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman are funny. Period. Those guys both have a very distinct delivery that never loses steam. The two of them know that this movie has been made before, but that didn’t matter to them either. They had fun making it which means we get to have fun watching it.
This movie went through stages, like any grown-up comedy. The difference being that this movie came back to being funny after all of the serious parts. With those serious parts, this movie becomes more than just a cookie-cutter comedy and becomes something a little more relatable. Even though this is a body switch, we can identify with the characters because we get to know them and see them at their weakest. We can feel for them.
I don’t know if there was much about this movies I didn’t like. The characters foiled each other well and remained interesting and consistent. It was shot in an appealing way. It was written well.
Sure, it’s been done before, but I don’t see anything wrong with a couple guys having fun making something so that we can laugh for a good hour and a half. It wasn’t inventive or original or unique, but it was something captivating, interesting, and special.
-Nick
I almost blinded Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday.
This is a movie that I have wanted to watch for a few weeks now. Finally, I have now gotten my chance and it was everything that I hoped it would be. No, it’s not an old movie. It was actually released this year. But it’s everything that a Grindhouse B-Movie could bring to the table. Blood, Guts, Decapitation, Bad Acting, Stupid One-Liners and Flame-Broiled Children (Not Kidding). This was a story of a hobo who just had enough.
It’s funny sometimes to watch action movies and see explosions that decimate entire buildings and people in the blast radius only fly a few feet away. I mean, really, people that close to an explosion that powerful would probably just be blown to pieces just like the building behind them. I guess I don’t care that much because then every action movie would just be our hero dying just before midway through the story.
That was one of the things I noticed when I watched Battle: Los Angeles tonight. Please, understand that this movie was awesome. I am in no way knocking it, at least not yet. Read more after the jump.
When I hear this movie brought up, I generally get common excitement. People really seem to love this movie. And I can see why. It’s not that I didn’t like the movie, it’s just that in the years after this movie has come out, I feel that its message has been portrayed in a more fun and in less of a classroom-viewing nature.
