I’ve disliked all the previous “pirate” movies, but had a certain fondness for the newest one. Maybe it had to do with the fact of expectations – I didn’t care how good it was. I just wanted to get out of the apartment for a couple of hours and it was the only movie playing with the “early-bird” (buck or two off) showing at a local theater.
It was good and had no reason to be. It was big, expensive, weird, even dark at times, and I was glad to see the absence of Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom. This is not because they’re bad performers, but neither of them really had much to do in the first few films. It reminds me of the characters that Megan Fox and Shia Labeof play in the the Transformers movies – get rid of ‘em. They are the characters that people can point to and say “that’s me”. Stupid and pointless if you ask me (you didn’t).
The best part of the movie might be where Jack is integrated by a big, fat King George the II, played by Richard Griffiths. Griffiths is sort of channeling his character from Withnail and I as a pompous, aristocratic slob. No where in space and time has a person ever looked or acted like that, but if they did, I could watch a movie of just that person.
I’ve often been outspoken of loving stupid, cgi-filled, adventure movies. The Mummy series and Tomb Raider movies are very close to my heart. However, there was something about the earlier Pirate films that turned me off. Probably the action scenes – they were just…bad.
Jack Sparrow finds himself having to go to the Fountain of Youth. Why? Well, we’re never really sure. Mostly because of this chick Angelica, who he banged out before she became a nun. They eventually set up that Jack will get his boat back if they get to the fountain. None of it really matters though.
There are ridiculously cool sequences involving trapping mermaids by using human beings at bait. All the personalities are over the top and Black beard, played by Ian McShane, manages to upstage even the most hammy and ludicrous of personalities.
The movie is notably directed by Rob Marshall. The promising talent who made Chicago, but followed that mediocre movie with the dismal Memoirs of Geisha and the shockingly unwatchable Nine. That he would decide to shoot a conventional, if not “already made” movie, is not surprising.
-Collin
By Collin, on March 30th, 2011
Marathon part 1 -Megamind
This wasn’t a very long marathon. Most good marathons are around four or five movies that go late into the night. I use to be better at them, but this one was just a practice marathon for longer ones in the future. I’m going to watch loads of movies all in a row on a Friday and give you my immediate impression. This one took a while just because I wanted to fix a few site things before publishing it. Enjoy!
Megamind is a pretty damn good movie about an evil villain, Megamind, who needs a “good guy” to fill the void in his life. Will Ferrell is great as the voice of Megamind and there are many gags in the movie that are extra funny just because of Ferrell’s delivery.
The movie starts out a bit sluggish for a hundred million dollar animated film, but picks up big time about a half an hour in. I especially recommend this movie for fans of Ferrell and people who are closely familiar with the Superman films.
Lastly, Jonah Hill plays Tighten well, but the character wasn’t as funny as I would have liked him to be. His deliveries and gags just pale in comparison to Megamind’s…but maybe that it is better that way. I give Megamind a solid B and hope we get more like it out of Dreamworks. It is no Incredibles, but was pretty damn good.
Marathon part 2 - Conviction
Conviction is a movie that could have been great but is down graded to very good because of tacky moments and poor writing. The film follows Betty Waters who, with only GED, enters school, College, and law school, all to free her brother she claims is innocent. Her brother Kenny, a light-hearted trouble maker, rots in jail as she spends nearly two decades trying to get him out. It is a incredible story and deserved pitch-perfect storytelling. It didn’t get that, but the story is good enough to stay compelling throughout.
Moreover, what makes the movie so watchable are the two stars who really take the movie to a different level, Sam Rockwell and Hillary Swank. Both talents can play trash in the most believable way. Rockwell has a swagger and defiance that doesn’t look like acting, it just seems to come so naturally to him. Swank is in almost every scene and, even in some of the cheesier moments, has nuance to her performance. With a perfect script and a great director, say David Fincher, this movie could have been a great film. All-in-all I give this one a B as well.
Marathon part 3 - Faster (2010)
Faster had a lot of potential to be really good but just made a lot of casting mistakes. Dwayne Johnson was the wrong choice for Driver. He’s too big, menacing, and emotionally impentrable to carry the movie. This is usually not the case with him, but it was in this movie and that has a lot to do with a the role.
The rest of the movie was just a revenge film where Driver goes around finding the people who killed his partner and betrayed him. It works, but the movie just tries to hard to be cool and ends up being too cheesy. You know the phrase, “The movie doesn’t take itself too seriously”? This movie did. It worked against it.
-Collin
By Collin, on March 29th, 2011
Sucker Punch – Movie Review
This movie is bad. I wanted it to be good. I really did. But it is on the level of The Last Airbender. A disaster. The only thing that separates it from that shit sandwich is it isn’t taking a dump all over sacred source material.
I dare someone to try to like this movie. I dare them. I understand people who will try to defend it, but they’re just plain wrong. It isn’t just annoyingly pointless, stylistic to a fault, and boring, it is a broken movie. It just doesn’t work. I was sticking with it for the first hour, but grew angry and almost walked out as the movie became progressively more dumb.
This movie went really wrong and just got worse, these are the reasons why:
1. Zack Snyder’s style has made him famous, this time it was his worst enemy
Synder’s style is very much his own. Always entertaining us with action, slow motion shots, insanely cinematic visual compositions. This is fantastic when Synder’s style is anchored with someone else’s source material – something this movie lacked. In Sucker Punch Snyder was allowed to let his imagintation run wild, as well as let the story run wild. I’m not saying he’s a bad writer, but the visuals of the movie needed a lot better story to supplement them.
2. There are way too many music video segments
This was actually a complaint of mine regarding Watchman. I figured these songs would be removed for the DVD version and different, original music would be included. Boy, was I wrong. This is the problem with Sucker Punch. A huge portion of the film has no dialogand is just famous rock or pop songs put to slow motion visuals. It is literally a nightmare for me.
What Snyder is attempting to do is similar to what Kubrick did in 2001: Space Odyssey. By playing music familiar to the audience, we zone out and tend to focus on the visuals. Instead, what happens to me was I realized what I was listening to was a famous song, with very specific lyrics, and the immersion factor is totally gone for me. Not to mention when everything is set so perfectly to music I can’t help but get annoyed if the entire movie is so painfully redundant.
3. The story is obnoxiously bad to the point of broken
What do I mean broken? I mean broken. As in, the movie is almost unwatchable. The film opens with a girl Baby Doll who is sent to a mental hospital and only has five days to break out before being lobotomized. A great premise, but everything goes wrong quickly. The movie’s entire opening is told in a slow motion sequence with a pop song playing in the background, by the way.
Moreover, the entire story falls down when Baby Doll begins slipping into fantasies. The story is told by one of the girls staying with her in the institution. There exists three worlds in the narrative : Reality, sub-reality, and fantasy. The film attempts to justify this by having an unreliable narrator, as did 300, therefore these realities could be justified. But they can’t be. Not within the logic of the film. Because what the fantasy-reality contains are actual pop culture and fanboy icons that the narrator of the story wouldn’t, and couldn’t, know. Unless she was ninety when telling the story.
This is all irrelevant because the story is not about interpretation, but tolerance. How long can you tolerate it. This is not a pun, but a truth. This movie is intolerable. Even if it was possible, every time the movie switched a fake world I just wanted to walk out. It was just boring. To ever say these segments were video games brought to live-action as a gross insult to video games. Video games contain emotional impact, plot devices, tension. These segments were just slow motion guns firing and women posing.
Snyder stated on Filmschoolrejects.com that an interpretation of the film is difficult because the cutting of important narrative material for a R-rating. I believe it.
4. This is Synder’s “The Fountain“, but The Fountain is infinitely better
The one shining light in Sucker Punch is it seems to be a very personal project. Synder was trying to do something interesting, but he got his R-rated material cut and didn’t give the audience enough to work with. Like Aronofsky’s film, Synder needed to have someone step in and tell him to make the movie more enjoyable for the audience he was making it for.
It wasn’t subversive enough for an arthouse community and wasn’t visually entertaining enough to keep the fanboys around. It was a huge mistake. Synder has also stated the film it is a statement against fanboy sexism. A worthy theme. But when you make a movie for fanboys, how does one expect to critique that culture with a film stylistically made for fanboys?
5. Synder never gave women a reason to watch the “300” film for women
Sucker Punch was obviously the alternative film to 300. As in, a movie with all female action stars, not all men. However, what made Sucker Punch so shockingly bad is that it fails to ever be about women. If Synder’s themes of objectification are indeed real, which they might be, then the film shouldn’t be packaged as a science-fiction, action film.
The themes are just not clear enough. Most importantly, by making a female action film about men, Synder has sold out any intention he might have had for progressive ideas. In doing this, he has been sexist, when he could have been progressive. A great movie about women who kick butt is an infinitely better statement than nerdy guys having trouble with sexy women.
Especially considering 300 lined its pockets with money from women drooling over Gerald Butler’s body. The objectification of men was obvious in 300 and it was part of the fun wasn’t it?
300 tapped into something deep in men. What exactly that was is hard to say. Sucker Punch attempts, and fails, to tape into a sisterhood experience that was so crucial to the film succeeding.
But even discussing movie’s themes that much gives it way too much credit…I’m literally shocked the movie was this bad. I can’t wait for the DVD release. Hopefully that will contain Synder’s intended vision, but even then there is just way too much slow motion and rock music. Really.
Leave a comment or E-mail me if you liked it. I don’t want to flame you or anything I’m just curious why people liked it.
-Collin
By Collin, on March 25th, 2011
Gallipoli - Movie Review
I trash Spielberg’s movies a lot for being a little…overly manipulative. Subtlety is not one of his strong suits. Spielberg is a genius, no one is denying that…but he tends to have moments that are a bit dramatic. The scene where Tom Hank’s character admits he’s a school teacher in Saving Private Ryan comes to mind. Gallipoli has a few of those moments…but I let Weir get away with them. Maybe I’m a hypocrite?
Gallipoli is a masterful Australian war epic. For once I actually want to hunt down the extended cut. The version I saw was only around an hour and a half. Hopefully a director’s cut exists.
Gallipoli has more weight when you envision what it means to the Australian people. I went in knowing what Gallipoli’s battles meant, and mean, to Australia and New Zealand, and the film was all the more poweful because of this.
The film follows Archy and Frank, two talented track sprinters, who join up with the Australian military forces during WW1. The story is simple: Two simple blokes get caught up in the war machine and end up fighting a senseless fight.
Most, if not all, Australians would be very familiar with this conflict. This shocks me because how many Americans remember anything about WW1? Even why it started.
Despite forming a decade before, many Australians believe that when they entered that war, that was when their country was really born. Many of the dates are national holidays/days of remembrance. It is important to go into the movie knowing what you’re seeing makes up many of the ideologies of Australians. How much of that is true on all levels of society I have no idea, but I don’t think it is all just propaganda.
The film is so patient, as all Weir’s films are, to get to know the characters. For people expecting war scenes they might be disappointed. The movie doesn’t bother showing us war – we all know what it looks like. Instead, it spends so much time with the characters, expounding on their innocence and goodwill, that when war approaches we can’t bare to watch.
Archy, played by Mark Lee (above), is a cartoon character of what an Australian might look like to people who’ve never seen an Australian. He’s a golden boy with sandy hair and boyish looks. Frank, played by Mel Gibson, is the Australian we’ve all become familiar with by now: Impossibly handsome and edgy.
But if you’re expecting Frank to act like a rebel without a cause, like I did, you’re going to be surprised. Instead, his disposition is friendly and helpful, if not for a bit of mischievous behavior and hatred for the English.
Frank and Archy race each other in the beginning of the film and Archy just edges him out. Frank loses a shit ton of money because of this and needs a financial out, therefore, wants to join up with armed forces. Archy is brainwashed by nationalistic ideology and joins up as well. This is not until after they both hitch a train to the wrong place and must trek across a desert together. Cool.
The film falls into a Full Metal Jacket style of two films. One story is of the innocence and kinship of a group of friends. Another is the tragedy that faces them in the devastating last few minutes.
The film follows a corny pattern of catch phrases and transparent, symbolic moments…but it works. Such as the film opening with Archy sprinting as he hears a gunshot and the film ending with the same sequence, just in a shockingly different scenario.
The final shot is indicative of many films, photographs, and moments in literature. Platoon comes to mind. 100-meter dash photographs come to mind. A religious annotation could be placed to it. It is a powerful freeze-frame. What an indicative moment.
The movie is incredibly anti-English in way that they actually molded events to paint the English as using Australians as cannon fodder for a military distraction. I don’t know if Weir really wanted people to think this is true. Instead, he might have wanted to make a film that was indicative of the way the soldiers on the ground, and Australians, felt towards England. Who knows?
A/5
-Collin
By Collin, on March 22nd, 2011
Ed Wood - Movie Review
Most people know who Ed Wood is these days. His movies are infamous for being charmingly bad and he is often cited as a quintessential filmmaker who loved movies, but had little or no understanding of how they are made.
I don’t know if any of these assumptions are necessary fair, but that is how Ed Wood looks at him. I think Ed Wood knew exactly how to make an okay movie, but just didn’t have the means or resources to make one. That might not be right, because I haven’t read too many books about him. I’ve only seen his movies. However, I gather that he knew how to put together a good production, but was just under so many constraints that he didn’t bother caring.
Well, that’s probably not the whole story, his movies are reallybad. Frankly, I’m not as charmed by them as most people are these days. I just find them annoying. They’re not entertaining in the typical cheesy fashion. They’re just boring and bizarre.
Tim Burton watched Wood’s movies with a certain delight. Reveling at the bizarre dialogue, continuity blunders, and lack of visual prowess. His movie, Ed Wood, is a lot of fun if you love shitty movies from the forties, fifties, and sixties. I used to think that a lot of these movies had value, but they are fucking shitty. My brother, Devon, disregards most movies made before the seventies, which is unusual for a film lover. If you think indepedent movies are bad these days, this time period has the WORST movies ever made. People have to remember that the Hollywood business was failing as it moved into the sixties. Movies like this and shitty studio pictures are a big reason the New Hollywood thing happened.
This is because if you made a movie, you could probably get it shown somewhere. The market was flooded with really, really shitty films. I’m talking bad. This made it so movies were made not for artistic prowess, but to earn a quick buck. Ed Wood’s films were pretty shitty, but so were most of the other exploitation movies from the fifties. They sucked! What made Ed Wood more intriguing than the rest is you could tell he loved these cheesy movies he was making. He wasn’t just trying to earn a lot of money.
Okay, now I’ll try to talk about the movie…it is pretty damn good. Johnny Depp stars as Wood and he plays him well. I doubt the real Ed had as much fearless enthusiasm, but it works. The movie is more about being a relentless artist in the face of adversity and getting an artistic work done by any means necessary, than it is specifically about Wood. Wood, in the movie, feels he lives in the shadow of Orson Welles, as do so many other filmmakers. I remember in Robert Rodriguez’s journal he mentioned that Orson Welles was already a famous director by the age of 26. Wood mentions this because he’s afraid he’ll never achieve anything special because he’s already thirty. Welles shows up in the movie, (fictionally of course) and it really is pretty cool when he does.
The movie is at its best when it focuses on the Wood and the aging Bela Lugosi. They have a fond relationship and, as much as the audience can tell, Lugosi really enjoyed being in these movies. He had a viscous drug problem in reality, a fact the movie doesn’t reveal until a hilarious scene involving a giant, stolen, prop octopus or was it a squid?
The film also has a great black and white look. For some reason it just looks perfect for the type of movies Ed Wood made and the era of filmmaking overall. The film is simply a rehashing of Ed Wood’s movie-making years and skips over the more dark elements of his personality. He died young from alcohol abuse and other bad things and that was only after doing porno for many years. A better movie might have been about the tradegy of untalented artists being unable to fullfill their dreams, but that is just my opinion.
All-in-all Ed Wood isn’t for everybody. It is a story about a pretty cool guy who liked to dress up in women’s clothes as well as make shitty movies. In fifty years I hope to see a movie about Uwe Boll. He likes to box journalists, as well as make shitty video game movies. A man can dream.
I’ve disliked all the previous “pirate” movies, but had a certain fondness for the newest one. Maybe it had to do with the fact of expectations – I didn’t care how good it was. I just wanted to get out of the apartment for a couple of hours and it was the only movie playing with the “early-bird” (buck or two off) showing at a local theater. 
Recent Comments