"No sense being a hero if you don't look like one."
This movie is said to be the best movie that nobody saw in 2006. After 5 full years of fighting in Iraq, the public was sick of war and jaded from glory, so most avoided this genre. Yet, this had more merit than anything I've seen in recent memory, bringing the grinding afterparty of military victory into full view. It starts after a combat unit that raised a flag on Iwo Jima got themselves into the front page of the paper. Realizing how inspirational the scene was, the brass sent them home for a tour of the country to raise money for war funds and to generate publicity. It hurt them to be called "war heroes". After all, the photograph was staged and out of the 6 people that raised the flag, 3 of them were already dead, and one was just pretending to be in the picture so he could go home. It was after the war ended that the situation got bad. Unemployed and forgotten by the public, poverty and discrimination made for a dreary livelyhood. Looking forward to Letters from Iwo Jima.
Acting Talent: 70% Logic and Sense: 85% Visual Stimulation: 95%
Besides a quick lesson in the administration of epinephrine, this movie is great for those times when you're so bored that you wish someone would get killed right in front of you so you could say something cool like "OH SHIT" . Jason Statham gets poisoned with some shit that inhibits his beta-androgenic receptors(and thus decreases heart activity), so to stay alive, he has to heighten his adrenaline level. That means lots of violence, robbery, high speed turismo, and drug injections. Unfortunately, Statham has this tendency to overdo it, and ends up tripping out on all sorts of substances instead. IF YOU STOP YOU DIE! When you need a boost, you have to get one no matter the cost, even if the cost is having sex in front of a crowd of people. Great scene btw. But whats with all the asian people in this movie? Is that supposed to be some kinda hidden message or are asian syndicates just a popular theme these days? Look at that arm. Nice vein tattoo. Acting Talent: 65% Visual Stimulation: 75% Realism Ratio: 2/10 Sex and Death Award
"HE REVERSED THE ENGINES! HE'S CREATING SUCTION! AND WE CAN THROW JUNK UP INTO THE PROPS!!"
"What the fuck is this about?", I thought, "Some kinda Titanic remake maybe?". I'd watched Titanic once, and did not intend to see it again. So I naturally avoided watching Poseidon, having had enough of rich people making love on sinking ships. Unlike Titanic however, this story cuts right to the chaos of naval vessile destruction, and the game of "keep away from the rising water level" begins early, continuing throughout the movie like several levels of a hazard ridden FPS. Unfortunately, the acting, drama, and otherwise are very much sub-par, inducing no more than soporific apathy when people's loved ones die or are sacrificed. Maybe they should have gotten a cast that can actually act. Overall, this movie is 10 years too late, and even then...well...it's just a shitty remake.
Acting Talent: 30% uggh Visual Stimulation: 70% Cheesy Altruism Award
We all know the story. But what is this really about anyways? Some Soviet era factory? Consumer supply/demand? Kids that are little shits? Can anyone tell me what the fuck is going on here?
The chocolate factory(aka. factory farm run by slave labor) is the last place you want to be. Why? Because Willy "asshole" Wonka will kill you and sing and dance as he disposes of your body. He's Hitlereque. No matter what he does, he has to be a dick about it. No matter what he says, he has to say it snidely. We see the kids, having been experimented on by Wonka's researchers, leaving the factory in various states of mutilation. This movie differs from the 1971 version in only one way. It's more extreme. That's all. They took the story and made it more fucked up, more emo, and MORE EXTREMEEEEEEE. Including Johnny Depp's face. Oh, and they cut the part with fizzy lifting drinks and replaced it with a dentist's appointment.
For this controversial movie, the film makers at DNA films decided to bring ex-dictator Idi Amin out of retirement (from Saudi Arabia where he resides) to play himself in a movie about his own regime. His acting is at it's best as he tortures random Ugandans and executes his own family members. Just kidding, I made that up.
This is actually a dramatization of the 1970's genocide in Uganda under dictator Idi Amin(ranks up there with Pol Pot), where a visiting English doctor on a mission of mercy gets mixed up with the local military. Amin rose to power with bloodthirsty charisma and a jocular persona, and he was so good at it that he distracted the international media from the pile of 300,000 bodies that he was dumping in the central African countryside. Thats about it for this flick. He told some good jokes, got pissed off after some assassination attempt, and killed one of his wives by cutting off her arms and sewing them onto the stumps that were her legs. Uggh. Oh, and he kidnapped some Israelis. There you go. Suprise, another African genocide.
Acting Talent: 85% Visual Stimulation:75% Fear Induced:35% Sickening Graphic Images That You Can Talk About Award
"You like science movies?" my buddy asks. He's the kind of guy who goes to the movie rental place and just grabs random stuff. This is not a good sign. "Uhh you mean science fiction? Well I sure did like Starship Troopers when I was 15 so let's go for it." A scifi original miniseries (or something), it promises only failure. What it delivers will rock your world. We didn't stop watching this thing until all six hours of it were over, pretty much the only marathon viewing I've ever done of anything.
The thing about this series is that it is totally original and compelling. Here's the premise: A detective comes into possession of a hotel room key that opens any door. On the other side of that door is an empty, cheap motel room. He can enter it and close the door, and when he re-opens the door it leads to any door in the entire world. The only problem: At one point, the door closes on his daughter while she's still in the room, and when he opens it again, she's gone.
But that's not all: Every object that's supposed to be in the room is missing. In the first episode, we find a guy who has a pen that microwaves people to death. Also, there's a woman with a nail file that knocks people unconscious when she holds it to the light. There's a comb that, when used, stops time for 10 seconds. Spectacles that inhibit combustion. A deck of cards that drives you insane. A pencil that, when tapped, makes a penny. These "objects," as they are known by their collectors, are all taken from the mysterious motel room, and each one has a strange power that seems totally unrelated to the object. Why do they exist? What does the room have to do with it? I figured it out by watching the whole series, and you should too.
Deja Vu:
Another entry in the "I found this movie at the movie store, so it must be good" files, this one is not really as good or interesting as The Lost Room. Set in New Orleans (for no good reason other than the city is a charity case), some terrorist blows up a ferry full of smiling, happy Navy seamen, their smiling, happy families and a few random smiling, happy passengers. Denzel Washington is called in to investigate the case, where he promptly finds a hot dead body and falls in love with her. C'mon, man, the CSI guys don't get the hots for every cute corpse that comes through the morgue. This is why you work in post-Katrina New Orleans and not in a cool city like Las Vegas, Miami or New York.
Little does Denzel know that he's not the only one to be assigned to this case. A super-secret government team with their own experimental chronosphere recruits Denzel to sit in front of a big monitor to look back in time four days and try to figure out who commits the crime. Denzel figures out pretty quickly that he's not really looking at a monitor screen, but through a time portal. Maybe because their lies about how their system "really" works are so insane and retarded that no idiot would believe them. Unfortunately, their explanation for how their "wormhole through time" works is just as bad. Anyway, as Denzel is busy playing peeping tom with the still-alive version of the pretty corpse (as she existed four days ago) when he decides to shoot a laser pointer at her head through the screen, which promptly breaks the whole thing somehow. Then he starts hollering at everyone to tell him the truth, and then things really start happening.
Denzel comes up with some pretty innovative ideas for how to use a time machine. Maybe instead of dicking around with it to see what happened back in the past we could, I daresay, go back in time and prevent the ferry bomb from going off? Gee, I dunno... We only went to Harvard and invented a time portal, it's not like we could creatively come up with ways to use it.
Smokin' Aces:
Here's a fun little flick, along the lines of Lock Stock and Two Smokin' Barrells and Snatch. If you've seen either of these movies and went apeshit over them when you first saw them, then you'll probably go apeshit over this one too. It has the same overblown "style" and quirkiness and goofy characters as the first two movies, and if you're easily amused by that kind of thing then, surprise!, here's more of the same.
Each of the goofy and/or formulaic characters in this movie is an assassin, all after the million-dollar price put on a mob boss/magician's head. Oh yeah, and they're all introduced by their names being printed REALLY BIG ON THE SCREEN AS THE ACTION PAUSES (with their profession printed in smaller letters below). If that little detail makes you mahogany hard with excitement, then this movie's for you.
-Two FBI agents (good guys) -Ben Afleck and his two ex-cop pals (semi-good guys) -Two Black chick assassins. The hot chick/master of disguise is a good guy. Her militant-feminist and less-hot lesbian pal with the ENORMOUS semi-auto .50 caliber sniper rifle is is not a good guy. -South-American professional assassin/torturer who kills people with wrist blades and chewed off his own fingerprints (bad guy) -Three neo-nazi kamikaze chainsaw-wielding kill-crazy assassins (good guys. J/K) -Master of Disguise assassin who kills people and sticks their faces in a machine that makes a rubber mask and then assumes their identity to kill more people (bad guy) -The mysterious "Swede" who's supposedly the most professional assassin on Earth. He figures prominently in the significant plot twist at the end (neutral guy?) -Random cross-dressing lawyer -Random karate kid with ADD who talks like a rap star -Random people who die
There is a twist, as mentioned, and it's pretty big. I'm, like, a genius though so I figured it out before they explained it (at length) at the movie's end. Geniuses like me can't watch movies like this or the Sixth Sense because we figure out the plot twist and ruin it for everyone else. Ok, i'm not really a genius (I was kicked out of G.A.T.E for eating paste) but the twist is pretty easy to figure out.
Also for Ben Aflek-haters: You might want to see this movie! *hint*
Whether you like the psychological horror genre or not, there is no doubt that the Silent Hill games are the best of the best and sets the bar for anything related. With the great success of the games came the movie which was also extraordinarily brilliant in capturing the theme of Silent Hill. Usually, movies from computer games suck total ass, but the movie was near perfect. Why? Because the film creators stuck closely to the source material. Let me repeat that again, the creators stuck closely to the source material.
I love Silent Hill, and when I found out that the entire graphic novel series was on bittorrent (I ain't no chump), I was excited. I had heard great things about the comic books, especially that they were hard to obtain due to being completely sold out even before they were finished printing the actual paper. Being the true fan of Silent Hill, I abstained from reading any spoilers or trying to know anything about the comic before actually reading it. Big mistake.
I could write a book on how bad this comic actually is, but I'll just talk about the worst parts of this gigantic train wreck.
First of all, the name "Silent Hill" is perfect. It's not overly scary sounding, and only slightly creepy. This does two things. First, it initially gives the impression that the town of Silent Hill is some quiet, peaceful place, which sets up the irony that it's actually a hell-infested perversion of your innermost fears. Second, it keeps out the goth kiddies whose favorite movies are The Grudge and the Grudge 2. So what's the title of the comic book?
Yeah, that's right. Dying Inside. When I first saw this, through my sinking dismay, I tried to have a positive attitude. "Ok," I thought, "the title is totally lame, but it's the first of it's kind and everyone makes mistakes." Which is true, I mean, look at any great comic book and the first issues look like total shit. So I browsed the other titles in the series:
Keep in mind these didn't all come out at the same time, so there is no excuse for this shit. I mean, "Dead/Alive"? Seriously, could they get more obvious? It's misleading because the reader thinks that there are two options, when there is only one: "suck". Could they possibly be more uncreative? "Among The Damned"? Are they in hell or something, I can't tell. "The Grinning Man?" Could that be the Grim Reaper? It's as if the writers bought these titles 10 for $10 at a Halloween discount store.
Then there is the artwork. In evaluating comics, I place artwork on equal importance as plot. Now, I'm not some art elitist and demand that everything be drawn realistically, but for fucks sake, it has to include some effort, and it has to make sense. Everything in the Silent Hill comic is drawn very sketchy and with high contrast colors. I assume that this is to blur the lines between fantasy and reality and give a very depressing atmosphere. Sure, that's fine for a couple of pages, but every single page is like this. It's not artistic, it's retarded. For example:
I mean, I think something important happened here, and I'd really like to know what. I think the Grey Smudges Of Death and the Indescribable Shades of Black got our main character, Lauryn (with a "y" because anything else conforms to the mainstream and that's not hip enough). "Ugh!" she says. "Ugh! You paid $3.99 for something looks a shitswirl on the side of a toilet bowl. The expression of the two guys in the last panel is priceless. It's almost as if the artist knows how incomprehensible the first panel is, but "Fuck it, just a couple more issues of this crap and I can move up to drawing covers for game-inspired novels like the critically acclaimed Starcraft Novels. Greatness here I come."
Ok, the style sucks and is totally different than the game and the movie which relied on it's realism for psychological terror, but whatever. At least the drawings are alright, especially the faces:
Actually, just forget it.
Let's move on to the plot. The plot is terrible. I could say more, but even I don't understand the plot due to the sheer amount of bad artwork and horrible dialog. In short, it's something about a psychiatrist who takes his patient to Silent Hill in order to cure her nightmares of the place, and blah blah blah. Rather than describe it, I'll let the pages do it for me:
I am....
....surrounded....
....by cliches.....
So we got some kind of tentacle monsters. That's funny, because I don't remember anything like that in the game. Then we got the standard scary little girl, but she's not scary because throughout all five god awful issues, she has the witty rebellious sarcasm of a teenager, which gets old in 0.5 milliseconds. In the issue, they run around Silent Hill, and all the monsters which made the games so great never appear. Instead we get goblins and demons again which are straight out of a Halloween discount store. Next issue is great:
A bunch of teenagers from Hot Topic find a video of Silent Hill and decide to go there to shoot a movie and make some money. This is just perfect because this idea has never been done before, and I think will start a new genre. I call it, the teen slasher flick. This crap continues for four illegible issues where they fight monsters that again, have never appeared in any Silent Hill game. At the end they all die, or they live, whatever it doesn't matter. In fact, all the other plots aren't even worth mentioning, it's just a total shit fest.
And what else sucks about this comic is the-
[AIR RAID SIREN]
Oh shit! An air raid siren, that can only mean-
PYRAMID HEAD, HELL YEAH
Finally, in the very last issue, there is one panel of multiple Pyramid Heads with the middle Pyramid Head holding not one, but TWO Great Knives. If there is any redeeming factor of this garbage comic, this is it. The writers finally decided in between smokes of a crack pipe and contemplating suicide that "Hey, maybe we should include a monster that is actually part of Silent Hill!". What an idea. Unfortunetly, this is as much Pyramid Head that we get. Along with two dog monsters that also never appeared in the game.
So just who are these writers that managed to negatively contribute to the greatness of Silent Hill? Take a wild guess in this picture of the two writers with the original designers of Silent Hill:
This is like one of those children's picture puzzles: Who does not belong?
But wait, I've seen that face before!
It all makes sense now. The shitty art, the poor plot. It's not fiction, IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. ITS ALL REAL. The demon of Silent Hill has taken real form and is trying to invade our world, one shitty comic at a time.
At the bottom of that picture is this message:
No, you didn't. Fuck off, Kris Oprisko and Ted Adams.
I'd like to end this review with a video of the best scenes from the remake of The Wicker Man, which adequately conveys my feelings about this comic:
Named after the famous precept of chaos theory, this movie became a cult classic during my freshman year of college. In the summer of 2004, I watched it for the first time on my laptop in a cramped 4-person dorm room of the Jian Tan international student center in Taipei, and was blown away by the concept. Traversing time with memories and changing the past? Holy shit, that might be my greatest wish, and im probably not alone. If that ability really existed, that would mean the end of human regret. Unfortunately, theres an issue of causality and the chaos created by the butterfly effect, meaning that there's a bit of discontinuity in the storyline.
This is a love story about a pair separated by timelines. He changes the past, things get fixed and then things get messed up again. The timeline takes him to all sorts of interesting places. However, if the ending isn't satisfactory enough for you, then try one of the ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS. What? It's a movie about causality.
