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#23: The Taking of Pelham 123

  • Jun. 29th, 2009 at 1:17 AM
Bigfoot
So... turns out that John Travolta is a maniac. He can be a good actor when you have a director who knows how to use him, and with every new movie he makes I grow increasingly convinced that Quenten Tarrintino is the only director who has that secret. He's a freakshow of overacting and profanity in The Taking of Pelham 123, which is a pretty mundane script with some good actors like Denzel Washington uttering "GO GO GO!" and the like, made all the more annoying by Tony Scott's directorial style of treating the camera like it was a baby rattle and treating the editing like it was a machine gun. Sprinkle in some stupid plot elements and you have a movie that allowed me to get to #23 on my quest to hit 52 movies this year... and not much else.

Plus, Denzel Washington looks kinda fat in the movie, which weirded me out. John Travolta and James Gandolfini looking fat didn't bothe me as much. I'm used to that.

The Taking of Pehlam 123: C –

New Character!

  • Jun. 21st, 2009 at 1:30 PM
Bigfoot
So in the twice-a-month Saturday Pathifnder game I play in, I'm moving on to a new character. And not because he was killed.

One of my favorite parts of playing RPGs is how the various player characters interact and work together as a team. So when the group DOESN'T work together as a team, it annoys me. As it worked out, playing a chaotic good bard in a group of morally-ambiguous folk who on one hand don't have any qualms about animating dead foes as zombies to serve as slaves but on the other hand seem keen to ensure that the chaotic good bard character faces punishment for crimes (real or imagined) made for a singularly unpleasant experience. And since a bard's strength is directly proportional to the amount of buddies he has to bolster, he's not so good when he's on his own (either because he's avoiding other PCs because they want to lock him up or because he's disgusted with their necromantic shenanigans and blase attitudes about enslaving the dead to carry treasure). And so my character snuck away from the group and is off to seek a different group somewhere in Irrisen or lands beyond that fit better with his mindset.

The new character's a ranger (ironically, a bounty hunter who's been looking for the previous character), and she's a lot less squeamish when it comes to undead, and a lot more capable of working on her own if it turns out that teamwork isn't an option. Sucks to lose the old character, sure, but the new character's looking pretty cool and I'm eager to see how the PFRPG ranger works out in play.

#22: Land of the Lost

  • Jun. 10th, 2009 at 1:29 AM
Bigfoot
So here's the thing. The ads for Land of the Lost make it look like a wacky family movie. But take note! It's rated PG-13! This isn't a kid's movie, I'm delighted to say, but kids will surely get a kick out of it. There's a fair amount of rather adult humor in it, some of it pretty awesomely subtle and more of it pretty blatant and crass and crude.  The special effects, while not super realistic, more than make up for that by being energetic and fun and imaginative. There's some really REALLY delightful dinosaur action in here, in fact, since the dinosaurs are just as much characters as the rest of the actors. They're not just Jurassic Park style monsters; they're kind of mean-spirited pranksters who take offense at these humans that keep showing up in their land and causing trouble. Also cool: sleestaks are still scary. Especially when they open their mouths.

The movie's sense of humor is really quite entertaining to me. Take this early example, when Hollie sees Marshall eating something strange:

Hollie: "What are you eating?"
Marshall: "A doughnut stuffed with M&Ms."
Hollie: "Ummm... why?"
Marshall: "To save time. This way, when you finish eating your doughnut, you don't have to eat M&Ms."

And for a taste of the naughtier side of the movie's humor, as Will is rowing Marshall and Hollie into his rinky-dink rowboat cave river white-trash attraction...

Will: "Keep your hands and legs inside the boat, and I should warn you, things get exciting, and you may get wet."
Marshall (Looks down at all his science gear and tachyon detector instruments): "That's no good; this equipment is very sensitive."
Will (Leers at Hollie): "I was talking to her."

HA! Delightful!

Also good to see dinosaurs enjoy bouncing on rubber rafts and don't stop at ice cream when they want food from an ice cream truck. And Chaka's a royal pervert. And the scene where Grumpy the T-Rex, frustrated after the 4th time Marshal says that the humans have the upper hand and not to worry because the dinosaur's brain is the size of a walnut, finds a walnut the size of an engine block and throws it at their cave wrapped in a giant leaf the same way a menace might hurl a brick through a store window with a threatening note tied to it. That scene's final shot of the T-Rex watching them from the jungle below, a look of crafty and simmering vengeance on his eyes as he steps back into the shadows of the jungle to bide his time was brilliant.

In short: Best Will Farell movie ever.

Land of the Lost: B+
 


#21: Up

  • Jun. 10th, 2009 at 1:22 AM
Bigfoot
Haven't seen a Pixar movie since, um... I can't remember, actually. Not sure why; I've always mostly liked their movies. Up continues that trend, with some really unusual visuals and some striking sequences... along with plenty of honest comedy that doesn't rely on pop culture references and poop jokes, which seem to be all the rage for most CGI movies.

Best character: Kevin, the bird. I want a pet like that.
Best line: "It's funny because a squirrel got dead."
Best nod to greatness that's come before: the South American plateau looked just like the Lost World from the old 20's silent movie of the same name. Too bad there were no dinosaurs up topside, but talking dogs and Kevin are pretty good substitutes.

Up: A –

#20: Drag Me To Hell

  • May. 29th, 2009 at 11:04 PM
Bigfoot

Once upon a time, my dad and my best friend went to the grocery store. The grocery store had a wall of video rentals, and my dad said, "Pick out a movie, kids, and we'll watch it!" I wanted one movie, my friend Joaquin wanted another, and my dad was getting frustrated, so Joaquin and I decided instead at the last minute to pick a THIRD movie that neither of us would argue over, a movie that had a promising quote from Stephen King on the cover, along with a good-looking woman in her underwear getting pulled underground by a bunch of demonic arms.

That movie was, of course, the Evil Dead.

My dad hated the movie, but I loved it. I didn't realize that at the time, but what I DID realize was that here was a movie like nothing I'd ever seen before. A few years later, when I saw the sequel on a different video rental shelf, I nabbed it immediately. Watching Evil Dead 2 was when I realized that Sam Raimi was one of my favorite directors.

SO. All of that brings me to Drag Me To Hell. This is the first full-on horror movie Sam's directed since Evil Dead 2 (assuming you, like I, count Army of Darkness as dark fantasy/comedy), and although Sam's certainly not been a slouch since moving away from horror (A Simple Plan, for example, or those Spiderman movies some of you might have heard about), I missed the old Sam whose twisted mean sense of warped humor haunted my parents' VCR so often back in the day.

As it turns out, Sam hasn't lost his touch. Drag Me To Hell has the same level of energy, crazy violence, and over-the-top mayhem that Evil Dead did. There's no Bruce Campbell, and there's a LOT less blood, but fans of Raimi and Evil Dead should not let Drag Me To Hell's PG-13 rating scare them off. Just because it's PG-13 doesn't mean that there's no projectile explosions of fluid, flying eyeballs, rotted corpses, horrific dooms, and other delicious mayhem... it just means that it's not as RED as it was in Evil Dead. If there's one fault with this movie, it's that it's maybe a little TOO old-fashioned and, thus, pretty predictable at parts. But when you're drawing on inspiration like M. R. James and the Three Stooges, old-fashioned is fine by me!

It's good to have you back on the team, Sam! Don't wait so long next time!

Drag Me To Hell
: A+
 


#19: Terminator Salvation

  • May. 23rd, 2009 at 12:47 PM
Bigfoot
There's basically three nice things I can say about Terminator Salvation.

1) The special effects are great.

2) There's a couple of really cool action set pieces.

3) It wasn't bad enough to inspire me to write a huge rant about it, which is what Terminator 3 did.

But for as awesome as special effects are, they age. Writing does not. There's a reason why the original King Kong remains great, and it's not because the special effects are super realistic by today's standards. It's because the writing, the directing, and everything else about the movie was great as well. Terminator Salvation's effects were quite incredible, and at times it threatens to be redeeming itself with some exciting action scenes, but the writing and (sort of surprising) the acting and the directing worked to make the end result little more than a special effects demo reel. Which normally means I'd give a movie a C for being just purely fun to watch, but since this was a chance to resurrect a great movie franchise, it gets demoted.

ALSO: I was pleased to see my theory of movie scriptwriting held up. Relatively early in this movie, a character says, "GO GO GO!" in an action scene. This is normally my clue that the screenwriter is either giving up on the project or doesn't have the creativity to be a good screenwriter. Now and then, a "GO GO GO" pops up that doesn't indicate this, but Terminator Salvation provides some nice proof and weight to the theory.

Terminator Salvation: D

#18: Angels and Demons

  • May. 23rd, 2009 at 12:45 PM
Bigfoot
Angels and Demons is a sequal to a movie that I was pretty much bored by, and it lives up to its predecessor quite admirably. The production values are great in this movie... and that's about it.

Angels and Demons: D

Monster Names

  • May. 17th, 2009 at 8:01 PM
Bigfoot
Giving a bunch of related monsters descriptive two-word names makes sense for computer RPGs, where often a monster's graphics are re-used (with different colors and skins) to represent varying power levels between the monsters. Doing the same for a tabletop RPG doesn't make as much sense to me, since you can have as many different shapes of monsters as you want without worrying about the time and resources to build a new 3D model of it for the game world to use.

Just another advantage that tabletop RPGS still have over computer RPGS, I guess!
Bigfoot
I'll avoid spoilers, but I have to say that the bang in which the latest season of Lost just ended was at once highly satisfying (it ended the exact perfect way that I thought it would) and highly shocking (one of the characters who we thought was who we thought WASN'T who we thought... so WHO IS HE NOW REALLY?). It's gonna be a long wait for the next (and last) season; here's hoping we'll see a return of Clancy Brown, find out the name of the island, see some old faces like Charlie and Claire come back, learn all there is to know about the monster, see the statue from the front (sure looked like a statue of Tawaret to me, which makes sense as she's a not-too-nice fertility goddess!), and more!

Gonna be a long wait! But it's gonna be worth it, I'm sure!

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#17: Star Trek

  • May. 9th, 2009 at 2:46 AM
Bigfoot
Star Trek. OMG AWESOME! Filled to the rim with cool nods to the original series, from beehive haircuts to musical cues to catch phrases to tribbles to neck pinches to green hotties to more. Plus, it has monsters!

My favorite movie of 2008 was a J. J. Abrams deal too. Cloverfield. Heck, there's even a Cloverfield easter egg in Star Trek. And now, Abrams has a chance of having my favorite movie of 2009 as well. There's a lot of competition though, what with Shutter Island, Avatar, District 9, and Drag Me To Hell, among others, but we'll see!

Spock made me weepy eyed with joy!

Star Trek: A+

#16: Fast and Furious

  • May. 9th, 2009 at 2:43 AM
Bigfoot
Fast and Furious is about Vin Diesel and some other people who drive cars fast, shoot guns, wreck cars, blow stuff up, drive cars faster, and then have some sort of forgettable ending that, although I just saw this movie less than two weeks ago, I for the life of me can't recall. There was something about drugs or guns or something. It was also loud.

Fast and Furious: C

#15: Wolverine

  • May. 9th, 2009 at 2:34 AM
Bigfoot
Wolverine was better than X3. But not much. Felt like fan-fiction to me. Fan-fiction written by a fan who doesn't understand that all the stuff he thinks is cool is stuff that WAS cool in other movies but in his hands looks like a cliche. And also, just because you can make something look real with special effects doesn't mean it looks real on screen if, say, you forget how gravity would affect your special effect.

Also: the movie should have been rated R becasue it's about a superhero who's special power is razor sharp claws and regeneration, both things that require gore to pull off. Heroes, which has a regenerating superhero, does this well. It's a LOT gorier than Wolverine. And it's on network TV. Weird.

Wolverine: C–

#14: The Haunting in Connecticut

  • May. 9th, 2009 at 2:31 AM
Bigfoot
The Haunting in Connecticut is an entertaining ghost story that uses the "Based on ACTUAL EVENTS" tactic. Bonus points for having ectoplasm. Minus points for being PG-13 and not R, because there was a group of some of the Most Annoying Teenagers EVER in the audience who did their best to ruin the movie experience. Fortunately, the movie wasn't one that was really all that awesome to begin with, but unfortunately those kids really needed better parents.

The Haunting in Connecticut: B–

#13: State of Play

  • May. 9th, 2009 at 2:26 AM
Bigfoot
State of Play is an interesting movie, if only because it's a political thriller similar to All the President's Men, in which a newspaper reporter uncovers a political conspiracy in the modern age when newspapers are dying and blogging is taking over. The concept that reporters and journalists are going away and thus no one will be digging for the truth is very much at the heart of this movie. Unfortunately, the movie makes one twist too many to its plot for my tastes. Still a good movie, but not great.

State of Play: B

#12: Crank: High Voltage

  • May. 9th, 2009 at 2:21 AM
Bigfoot
Wow... started falling behind on reporting movies seen. Lemme blast through what I've seen over the past month or so, in super summary mode, starting with Crank: High Voltage.

Crank 2 was delightfully insane, filled with over-the-top mayhem and ridiculous action and pure R-rated lunacy and entertainment. Good times!

Crank 2—High Voltage: B+

Book 11: Dead But Dreaming

  • May. 9th, 2009 at 2:14 AM
Bigfoot
So "Dead but Dreaming" is a Lovecraftian anthology that I've longed to read, but it had a REALLY small print run. Good news! Miskatonic River Press reprinted it and I bought it and read it!

Most of the stories were pretty good! )

Dead But Dreaming: B–

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Qwest for Internet

  • May. 9th, 2009 at 1:58 AM
Bigfoot
Frustrated.

My ISP is Qwest via a DSL modem, and it sucks. )
ANYway... anyone else out there have any experience with Qwest DSL or Comcast cable modem internet, or just DSL vs. cable in general, and have any advice?

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It Lives in my Television Now

  • May. 6th, 2009 at 9:35 PM
Bigfoot
As I was waiting for "Lost" to start, a commercial with lots of white came on. I noticed up near the top a black stringy thing, as if a piece of hair or fuzz was stuck to the top of the screen. I turned on the lights and went to investigate and it's not fuzz.

A spider the size of a dime has found its way into the inside of my TV, and what I was seeing was several of its legs sliding down between the glass/plastic front and the actual pixels of the screen. By smacking the top of the TV just above the spider, I got him to climb up and out of view, but he's still in there. Eating people on TV shows I don't watch, hopefully.

EDIT: Also? Lost is still super awesome. A hundred TV spiders couldn't change that.

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Rain!

  • May. 5th, 2009 at 1:22 AM
Bigfoot
The rain is currently coming down super hard. I approve. It shall help me sleep so I won't sleep in past my dentist appointment tomorrow.

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Out of Nowhere...

  • May. 3rd, 2009 at 12:54 AM
Bigfoot
This movie just became one of my most-anticipated movies of the year.

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