Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

I often misjudge movies by the title. This time, I thought the story was about angels and demons fighting in the underworld. Wrong. The kingdom of heaven was the name given to the now defunct Kingdom of Jerusalem, the holiest of holy countries and host of everything valuable to the devout. This extinct country was the Christian stepping stone into the middle east. Whenever Islam crept too close, european crusaders would come from all over Europe in defense of the holy kingdom.

I once played a campaign in Age of Empires where you play as Saladin, the Jihad king. The story in that game is narrated by a captured Christian knight that joins the Islamic army and writes letters about Saladin's quest to drive white people out of the holy land. The plot of this movie is very very similar to that. And what a coincidence, because that's exactly what I wanted to see. I love stories about religious armies. And bombards.

Viewers of Kingdom of Heaven will be constantly reminded the glaring parallels to Return of the King. You could say that this is a gritty Middle Eastern version of LotR where instead of being a shitty elf, Orlando Bloom gets promoted to Ghandalf status. The shots often pan wide to show you epic military formations on a massive scale, great spiring cities that resemble Minas Tirith, and breathtaking Mediterranean landscapes like those in Assassins Creed.

Rating: 100%

Valkyrie (2008)

Tom Cruise in an eyepatch was enough to dissuade me from watching this for many months. And rightly so. This movie, I suspect, was scripted in a way that would maximize the anxiety and nervous jitter to give even the most boring scenes an edge of fear. Whenever you see Hitler on the screen, the music gets super dramatic. Even as the Fuhrer picks up his pen and signs his paperwork, Tom Cruise glances around nervously as if Hilter himself was about to slap him in the face.

Having been horribly maimed and growing tired of Hilter's Germany, eyepatch Tom Cruise attempts a coup in hopes of ending the war. He is a resourceful leader and a soldier of principle, but also a dull and unremarkable actor. As operation Valkyrie comes to it's decisive conclusion, he yells, "LONG LIVE SACRED GERMANY". teehee!

The last act is the most redeeming part of the movie. It's 1944, fast approaching the final days of the Nazi supreme court. An old man is being charged with treason, and as he is taken away, he screams that all of them will have to face justice in the end. Nuremberg is just a few steps away.

I love movies about Nazis.
Rating: 50%

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Have you seen Independence Day? If yes, then have you seen The Day After Tomorrow? Do you want to see these movies again? If so, Keanu Reeves can help you with that. This is basically an upgraded version of those epic disaster movies. Keanu plays the voice of the alien invaders and sucks at his role (as usual).

The aliens he represents have come to earth in order to kill off the humans and protect the environment. Really, they're actually there to stop global warming. Without any potent defense, the human race begs for their lives. They plead for the right to exist, promising environmental changes in exchange for mercy. Religions are mobilized. As the military fails, society falls into chaos.

In the end, humanity's greatest weapon turns out to be philosophy. The alien invaders are thwarted by a simple rhetorical argument explaining the existence of civilization. Poof, the violence ends.

Bull shit. Gay ending.
Rating: 40%

Ironman (2008)

This takes you through the research and development of Tony Stark's flying mobile suit. He starts with crude Ironman armor that he built from scrap metal and slowly progresses into a minted exoskeleton that goes around fighting entire armies. Stark is mainly concerned with singlehandedly disarming the Taliban, which I thought to be a misuse of his talents.

The majority of the movie is spent watching Tony Stark assemble shit, while the military action, the stuff that people want to see, is a vast minority of the screentime. This was good for developing Stark's "rude genius" character but very bad for satisfying your need for raw action. Overall, this was almost exactly the same as Hulk 2008. Both these characters start shit with the military and end up fighting copies of themselves, the only major difference between them being that one is made of metal and the other is green.

The Ironman song sucks. This is the real Ironman theme song that Tony Stark listens to.
Rating: 60%

Seven Pounds (2008)

At first, I didn't understand why this was called Seven Lbs. It didn't seem to conform to any pattern of 7 objects in the movie, so for the longest time, I thought this was The Pursuit of Happyness 2 or some shit. Will Smith was going back and fourth to different hospitals and hitting on women with medical illnesses. What? Was he a salesman again? As he starts having sex with one of these needy women, my attention to the movie faltered.

Will Smith appeared to be going around looking for "good people". Once he found them, he would bequeath them one of his possessions. His motivation for doing this was a gnawing feeling of remorse, which was slowly driving him insane. Fortunately, everything gets explained at the end of the movie, bringing the purpose of all this suspicious shit into clarity. This is an end of life story. Basically, it asks you, "What would you do with your life if you know when you're going to die?" and shows you what this guy did.

Rating: 50%

Watchmen (2009)

Superhero movies are just gay. I think they're overdone, the acting sucks, and the costumes usually look like shit. So when I saw this guy dressed as Hawkman, I lost any interest I might have had in watching this. Then I found out about the transdimensional blue guy, which made the whole thing much more appealing.

Not having any prior knowledge of the comic series, I found this amoral superhero to be pretty satisfying. The blue guy doesn't give a shit about people because he's on another dimension of existence and human affairs no longer matter. It rekindles sociological ideas about how much humanity sucks and how people are petty and worthless. So in Watchmen, we see them beating up people all the time and disposing them like they're nothing. Basically, you can do whatever you want because the desires and opinions of other humans are puny and irrelevant. That is the basis of a good superhero movie.

Blue caulk. I'd like to see people try to dress up as these characters because it is totally impossible (Rorschach) and nobody should even try to cosplay as the blue guy.
Rating: 70%

Hospital Survival Horror

So I am in a hospital for an undefined reason. Not because I'm sick or anything, I'm fucking invulnerable and a golden example of manly health and strength. That's why I'm in the waiting room. There's people being led into the back room to be put in the hyperbolic time chamber or some shit so they can heal for a year while I wait a mere 8 hours in a room full of whiners.

It's pretty easy to pick out the sickies of the bunch, the ones waiting to be given IV's full of rejuv potions. They're all old, desperate-looking folk with sunken eyes and ragged claws from digging in the mines for decades.

But that's not important because, as I was taking an elevator ride up to the fourth floor, I suddenly got some very powerful Left 4 Dead "No Mercy" flashbacks. For those not into such things, "No Mercy" is the campaign which takes place mostly in a large inner-city hospital. Standing there alone in the elevator, waiting for the doors to open, I had the sudden shock at realizing that I was totally unarmed. I don't even have a goddamn pocket knife, who knows what the hell was lying in front of me.

Of course zombies are stupid fairyland shit, but zombie fear is based on the very realistic fear of epidemics. What are you going to do if you wake up in a hospital and find dozens of infected doctors, nurses and patients crawling on the ground and vomiting their internal organs? How do you get out of there without getting infected blood, vomit or shit on you? What about the crazies whose mental states have been compromised, and they run through the halls babbling nonsense and scratching at you with their horrible bloody fingers? Which leads right back around to zombie fear, which makes the whole thing seem stupid.

But it might only be a matter of time before an actual, viable epidemic (Possibly Airborne or "Double" AIDS) hits a populated city and the hospitals become swarming cauldrons of horrifying, filthy death. Just the thing to wonder about the next time you go to the hospital because you faceplanted for a youtube video, you spaz.