INKSTAND

*sigh*
They tried to play up the Batman/Joker dynamic that never really had a chance to come into fruition or mature. This new villain is suddenly Batman’s counterpart? He hardly had time to earn it.
Batman’s voice, while abrasive in Batman Begins, was just comical in this one. I burst into laughter several times and at one point I had no idea what he was saying. Bale formed his mouth as though he were wearing a retainer and lowered his gravely voice making his speeches about justice and shit…well, laughable.
There were also some huge plot holes. For more on that, and a similar take on the move, read Jeremy’s review as well as the first comment on it.
I liked Maggie Gelen…Geyln…Gellyn…Gay cowboy’s sister much more than Dawson’s Creek girl, but she doesn’t really fit in a Batman movie. I liked the realism of the outdoor city scenes, probably because my retinas are still scarred by the hideous, neon debacle that Joel Schumacher delivered years ago. I also liked Harvey Dent/Two Face, if only because I wasn’t expecting it. I agree with others that his character development was rushed, but I didn’t feel as crowded by his character as I did with all the villains in Spiderman 3.
All that being said, I’m going to show you now the very best part of this movie-going experience (even Billy Corgan didn’t ruin it):

I didn’t see the 2003 Ang Lee Hulk movie. Well, I did, but you know the old story. I was wasted. Or fell asleep. Or both. But it’s well know that this is not a sequel to that movie. That being said, I’m very glad that they decided to forgo the whole “origin story” with this movie. They show some of it, but just during the opening credits, catching us up, but sparing us from hearing yet another rendition of a well-known song.

I’m going to cut to the chase. What interests me most about this movie is it’s part in the build-up to the Avengers movie, planned for summer of 2011. I read that there are plans for a Iron Man sequel and a Thor movie in 2010 and a Captain America and Avengers movie in 2011.(most of this is confirmed on IMDB) The Iron Man movie that came out earlier this year seemed like a set up for something else, especially since the only real bad guy was a geezer with a similar weapon. Of course this is true since after the credits we see Sgt. Nick Fury of S.H.E.I.L.D. approach Tony Stark about the Avengers Initiative. Similarly, at the end of Incredible Hulk, Stark comes to General Ross about forming a team.
What I’m having a problem with is the continuity in which these films are taking place. We have regular continuity and “Ultimate Marvel” continuity. Nick Fury looking like Samuel L. Jackson (and thus played by SLJ) is from Ultimate, however the term “Intiative” is from regular continuty, a team that was formed after the recent Civil War. Also, Tony Stark revealing his identity to the public is from regular continuity, but Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk while trying to re-create a super soldier serum (this is foreshadowing to Captain America, BTW) is from Ultimate.
Ok, so I’ve strayed waaaay far from reviewing this movie (It was good, if you like action movies/comics, you’ll dig it). I guess what I want to know about is Thor. I LOVED the idea of Ultimate Thor. He was a beer-swilling hippie that everyone thought was crazy and delusional, and his brother Loki, god of mischief and trickery, convinced everyone he was just a loony human with a super-suit and got him locked up. Is that gonna be the Thor movie? And the Avengers…What other Avengers will be on the team? The incestuous brother/sister team of Qucksilver and Scarlet Witch from Ultimate? Vision, the robot from regular continuity? Which form will Henry Pym take? Giant Man, Ant Man, Yellow Jacket? Who’s the villain? Skrulls? Red Skull?

ok, i’ve gone on enough. All my questions will soon be answered. Now check out this awesome Hulk Theme song from the 60’s. That, along with the others, tells with frying-pan-over-the-head obviousness that Stan “The Man” Lee was still runnin the House of Ideas when those were made. Who else would ryme “gamma rays” with “unglamorous.”

This movie rocks, plain and simple. That is, if you enjoy seeing people get blown to pieces, which I do.
There is, of course, some weak-adhesive of a plot that holds this thing together. Some dumb-assed do-gooders want to go to Burma to help people or something, and Rambo tells them it’s a bad idea. They get killed/captured and the mercs sent to save them get killed/captured. Now Rambo has to save their stupid asses and defeat an army in the process. This of course leads up to a final battle that was full of what was best described by someone in the room (Matt? Bird?) as “Reagan-era violence.”
Computer graphics are utilized in some of the best ways I’ve ever seen, ripping people apart, setting them on fire, and having arrows shoot through them. Old-fashioned blood-burst-packets are used as well. Women and children are not spared, as the militants savagely shoot and/or rape them. This of course more than helps to justify Rambo’s liberal dismembering of their bodies, dispatching of their limbs, and exploding of their heads.

Here is a nice montage of the action…Not too many innocent people getting f’ed up here, mostly just the bad dudes. So don’t feel guilty, just watch.

Ugh, whatta piece of crap. What started off as a lame haunted slasher movie turned into a bunch of stuff I stopped paying attention to. I tried. I mean, there were little girls dying and hidden teddy bear cameras and stuff, but I didn’t really get it. I’m sure the Japanese version was more entertaining. The film has, however, introduced another phrase into the catalog of inane crap I repeat over and over: “That’s not my ringtone!”

Years ago a man named Billy got the high score on Donkey Kong. Recently, a man named Steve claimed to have beaten that score. Who’d have thought a documentary about this situation could be so much fun to watch.

First of all, Billy is really full of himself. He exudes a brand of confidence rarely seen in an individual, much less someone who played a lot of Donkey Kong. He spits phrases that seem right at home on a No Fear t-shirt and wears his hair in a style that I don’t think was ever popular.

Steve is a man who never fulfilled his dreams of being in a band. He got laid off at Boeing the day he bought his house and went into teaching. He has a wife and kids who seem to just barely tolerate his drive and mild-mannered passion to beat Billy’s high score.

I got some strange feelings from both these men from things that either I inferred from the movie, or the movie only eluded to. I got the feeling that Billy is a control freak. There are shots of him stocking store shelves with the hot sauce from his restaurant, as vendors tend to do. He clearly pushes other products on the shelf to the side to create more facings for his hot sauce. I also think he insisted on certain things about how the film was presented. For instance we don’t see his wife, or even know that he’s married until he’s about to encounter Steve for the first time. Then he brings her out, of course she’s “hot”, and he struts her around the arcade. An arcade, mind you, where everyone kisses Billy’s ass and sort of snub Steve, hoping he’ll lose. Oh, that’s another thing, they have to compete for the title and Billy gets all weird and mind-gamey with Steve.

As far as Steve goes, his wife doesn’t say it directly but it is clear that she is at her wits end over the whole video game thing. She tells how people came to inspect Steve’s home Donkey Kong game, bother her mother and basically breaking in. His daughter is shown once saying something to him about it destroying his life. Even on the video that he sent in originally, you can hear his son yelling and crying in the background to be “wiped” while Steve tells him to wait.

This is a pretty entertaining movie because the people in it create drama wherever they can find it.
Here’s a clip of Steve winning. Note how everyone kind of doesn’t want him to win. Also note how Billy does everything from afar, via telephone. His response to Steve winning here was to send a video tape of him beating the score. So much drama!

So I never make “best of” lists at the end of the year because I don’t remember what came out when. I will say now, however, that this is the best movie of 2007. If you read the reviews on IMDB, you will see that nearly everyone thinks it’s terrible. In fact there are so many reviews that I’m sure people felt it was their duty to speak out against it. It’s true, the movie is chock full of bad acting, cliches and run-of-the-mill CG (which some people thought was good), but I think what is resposible for it being terrible also makes it terribly interesting. It’s a movie in english starring American actors but it was made for a South Koeran audience. That’s why the dialogue sounds like a program on Nick Jr. It’s slow and clear because it’s intended for an audience who’s primary language isn’t english.
The story’s not very complicated but when the back story was being told there were so many times i tuned out. Even the kid hearing the story kept saying “What do you mean?”
In a nutshell…Good serpants and bad serpants want the soul of this reincarnated chick to become big dragons. The bad one will destroy the world if he gets it. The bad one also has an army of magic dudes and huge lizards with lazers on their backs and flying mini-dragons and stuff. And while the bad dragon is so very prepared, the good dragon shows up at the end. What was he doing all this time? What a lazy good dragon. Or imoogo or whatever they call it in the film.
The battle scenes are pretty cool. Shit gets fucked up and you can tell by the way the crowds run and scream that this was made by an asian director.

I was writing Review #237 while watching this movie, so I didn’t pay real close attention. What I did notice is that after a lot of build up (and shooting guns) the final fight scene delivers nice clear shots of the lycanthropes duking it out. Unlike a certain Alien Vs. Preadator sequel I recently saw.

I knew that the plot of this movie was going to be lame. I knew it was just going to be some cheap adhesive to hold together a battle between Aliens and Predators. I knew I was going to hear lines like:
“People are dying!”
and
“God help us all!”
The reason I wanted to see the movie is obvious. Bad-ass monsters fighting like bad-asses. Also, there was the promise of a “predalien”, a hybrid of the two creatures that was hinted at at the end of the last movie. I’m sure this has been a fantasy of many a nerd ever since the two franchises merged in Dark Horse comics in 1989. I know I drew a couple back in 7th grade.
So here he is:

Pretty cool, huh? Unfortunately that’s the best shot you’re going to get of him. Most of the movie is more like this:

Dark, rainy, and too much movement to tell what’s going on. I had a difficult time differentiating between a drone alien and the Predalien. The mosters had already been made, looking awesome, in their own respective pictures. Why was it so difficult for the director to show us this awesomeness in an all-out, well-lit battle? Oh, also I guess there were supposed to be tons of Aliens, like a swarm, but we never really saw that many. No long shots of the town just being devoured by them. That would have been nice to see.
All these things made the crappy plot unbearable. I felt like I was watching a SciFi Channel movie with a bigger budget and less conviction.

This review is for the Queering the Apparatus Queer Film Blog-A-Thon.
In my experience, Don Roos’s comedy, The Opposite of Sex, rarely shows up in discussions of gay cinema. However if it’s not about comic books and/or Passions I’m not well versed in it so I’m probably just not paying attention. It may pass under the radar because the biggest stars at the time of its release were Christina Ricci and Lisa Kudrow, both playing straight characters. That’s not to downplay Martin Donovan’s performance, but at the time Friends was in it’s hay day and Ricci hadn’t yet started looking like a creepy alien. It also doesn’t have a lot to do with many gay social issues but mainly the lives of these specific people. It might be because it has little or no eroticism in it, especially for a movie with the word “sex” in the title. The sexiest it gets is when Ivan Sergei’s character is swimming, right before Ricci’s character seduces him.

So what is this movie about? Basically a young woman Dede Truitt (Ricci) who runs away from her mom’s house to her half-brother’s house and causes trouble for everyone she comes across. She steals her brother’s boyfriend (Ivan Sergei), her brother’s dead boyfriend’s ashes (Collin Ferguson), extorts her bother for money a couple of times with the aid of the boyfriend (Sergei) and his ex (Johnny Galecki). Kudrow plays the sister of the dead boyfriend, commonly referred to as “Tom the dead guy” by Dede who is narrating the movie. There’s a lot of scandal, one-liners and road trips.
I am now going into bullet mode. This helps me out when I have points to make but can’t organize them into paragraphs.
What was cool
- The one liners are great in this movie, from “Teachers need to learn, no means no…at least until we’ve dropped out,” to “There are a lot nicer people coming up. We call them losers.” A lot of these quotes can be found here.
- The best lines are delivered by Kudrow. Her portrayal of an exasperated woman with pent up frustration that must be let out because of the arrival of this trouble maker is thoroughly entertaining. She’s one of those people who complains all the time, but it’s fun because she’s mostly only complaining about Dede and not you.
- Dede says at the beginning, through narration, “I don’t have a heart of gold and I don’t get one later.” It’s so true, she plays a skeezy, scheming bitch the whole time. It’s great!
- Donavan’s character, Bill, delivers a small speech that had quite an effect on me when I first saw this film. Check out this video, about 2:30 into it.

What was lame
-Lyle Lovett’s performance was very difficult to watch. The man cannot act. I feel he was thrown in there only as a romantic interest for Kudrow’s character so everyone could have a happy ending.
-The last seconds of the movie leave us wondering if Dede did, in fact, grow a heart of gold. I like to think she didn’t.

I sure wish this was more thought out and stuff, but it’s getting so close to midnight. I have to post it now! At least I did this instead of homework. Come back for more reviews of stuff and maybe a more thought-out edition of this one.

When I saw Welcome to the Dollhouse so many lives ago the thing that made the biggest impression on me was that it had no ending. I was a little confused at first because I don’t think I had seen anything like that before, but it made so much sense. Nothing changed for Dawn Weiner. She didn’t become a hero, she didn’t grow out of her awkwardness and you can bet she continued to get bullied at school. It was reality. We see how Dawn ends up in Palindromes as the movie opens with her funeral.

Palindromes is another offering by Todd Solondz of characters that are pathetic when we meet them and, rather that overcoming adversity and prevailing, end up just as miserable if not more so than when the movie started. In this film we follow Aviva, a thirteen year-old girl who is determined to get pregnant. She does so and her parents put an end to it, prompting her to run away. She encounters a truck driver with who, it is hinted at, is an ex-con for some sex offense, and who she feels some sort of connection to. She also meets a family consisting of cheery, bible thumping parents and a team of adoptive children all with some sort of handicap. This family are the only characters that are always happy, but naturally they do not escape the perpetual glum reality of Solondz’s films. The truck driver and Aviva see the anti-abortionist father as a major threat (I don’t recall the exact reason, but it has something to do with him discovering that Aviva has had an abortion) and decide to take him out. One of the children, a little girl, gets caught in the crossfire, and it’s all downhill from there.

The main idea of this movie is essentially what I felt after seeing Dollhouse, and is summed up at the end of the movie by the character Mark Weiner, Dawn’s brother, who is being accused of molesting his other sister’s baby. He talks about how people never change, that no matter what happens to them they are the same, forwards and backwards, because we are hard wired that way. “If you‘re the depressed type now, that’s the way you’ll always be,” Mark says. “If you’re the mindless, happy type now, that’s the way you’ll be when you grow up.” I can’t say I agree with that completely, I think you can be the depressed type all your life but you can change how you deal with it. However, I think Mark would file that under “People think they do (change), but they don’t.”

I enjoyed this film, but I felt the pacing was rather slow. There were a couple of times I wished the “la-la-laing” in the score would hurry up and the film would get to the next scene. I don’t see myself watching this movie too many times again. Happiness set a standard for me. The pacing was great, the script was great, the acting was great, and while Solondz’s movies always leave an impression, none have entertained me as much as Happiness.

One other thing, I do like how Solondz used several different actors to play Aviva. They ranged in age and hair color and were played by both black and white girls, including Jennifer Jason Leigh. I think this was an effective was of showing drastic change in a person who essentially remains the same in their core.