29/April/2012
Went to see Avengers Assemble. Can't say I was too disappointed, really. Expected some superhero romp fun, and that's what I got.
Just for giggles, let's see if I can save myself the time of
recapping and let a picture do the talking.
... just pretend that the Hulk, Hawkeye and Black Widow are there, and they're
all gonna beat up Loki because he's doing bad stuff, right? It's close enough.
(I could've had the Hulk and Loki, but you wouldn't believe the
resale prices on their minifigures, it's bloody sacrilege!)
I will admit I was a little wary about the movie since the
last Marvel superhero sequel I saw was Iron Man 2, and for all the hype,
it was just okay. It was fun, I guess, but it didn't have a patch on the
first film - the first one had heart, had humour, and had drama, and the sequel
had a few good laughs and a change of pace in terms of story and drama, but
nothing to the same greatness.
Avengers actually comes across pretty well. Having to cram like four
movies worth of characters and subplots into one movie is pretty damn daunting,
but it balances all the aspects well: story, humour and character drama. There
was mad hype about ALL THESE DUDES ON SCREEN IN THE SAME FILM!!,
but the movie does make an effort to not pee its pants right then and there and
tries to create a coherent, enveloping story. Admittedly there's not much more
to the story besides "Loki's a manipulating dick" and "S.H.I.E.L.D. seem a bit
untrustworthy," but it does the job. It does take a while to get going, but once
it's going it's a good, fun ride.
All the characters got balanced well, with a fair amount of story and action for each of the heroes. Even dorks like Black Widow and Hawkeye got a good bit of screen time, even though their powers are shit. When over half the cast are practically indestructible, one wonders how they'd get a chance to work a professional interrogator into the story, but Black Widow makes some vital contributions to the story, so good work! Captain America arguably suffers in comparison when it comes to story; there's allusions and jokes made about how he doesn't quite grasp the 21st century world, but nothing as in-depth as the other guys' gripes. That said, director Joss Whedon at least announced before the movie's release that he had to cut a big chunk of Cap's story from the film, and it'll be available as DVD extras, so it's not like they actively tried to snub him. Gotta take that runtime into account, yo.
The story is played pretty seriously, what with the climax involving robo-aliens blowing the crap out of Manhattan and Loki manipulating everyone and oh man ALL THIS ANGST... but there's a refreshing amount of humour. Heck, even Thor manages to get off a few one-liners! There's a lot of fun scuffling between the crew, and the Hulk gets so many hilarious slapstick moments - punching Thor for no reason after the two beat up some aliens, slapping Loki on the ground like a rag doll... it's a lot of fun. And I personally believe that's what superheroes should be - fun! Whether it's the whimsy of adventure or the excitement of superpowers or just the rock-em-sock-em romping of two invincible dudes busting each others' nuts, this stuff should be fun. The Avengers captures that pretty darn well.
There were a fair few kids in the audience, though we did get the early afternoon showing, so it's to be expected. Two of them were in costume, one as the Hulk and the other as Captain America. Totally adorable, but a lot of the kids couldn't have been any older than 6, and the movie is rated 12A, so they were rather young to be seeing it. There was a fair bit of gabber behind us, and anything that wasn't dudes in costume garnered complaint - nothing that made me want to slam Mjolnir into a few skulls, but a mite irritating, is all. It's nice to see kids still taking interest in superhero rubbish, though I get the impression none of the movies nowadays aren't terribly kid-accessible. What we need is a Batman & Robin sequel. Arnie's no longer a governor, so I propose our tax dollars go towards making him act as Mr. Freeze for the next five years. I see nothing wrong with this plan. He never regrets a role, folks.
Continuing the cinema experience commentary: oh my god, it is
so nice to finally see a film in 2D again! I was able to live with it in John
Carter by wearing the 3D glasses on top of my regular ones, but really, you
shouldn't have to make ludicrous compromises to your comfort because the movie
is so hard to watch. What benefit are you getting from shit moving on different
cel layers? You get the privilege of going "huh, look at that" on a few
occasions, and then the rest of the time you're struggling to make out what's
happening. I've no idea how on earth I would've comprehended any of the action
scenes were the film in 3D.
Honestly, give me a big clear screen, a good sound system, an enthusiastic
audience, and that's all you need to get a good cinema experience. 3D and all
that bullshit can take a hike.
It should be no surprise when you're reading the dumb blog of a guy who digs superhero junk, but Avengers Assemble is pretty fun, and really, you should probably know by now whether or not it's your kind of film.
22/April/2012
Watched all three RoboCop movies earlier in the week. Thoughts!
RoboCop: One of those films I'd been meaning to
see for a long time, so it was nice to finally catch it.
Cop gets killed on duty, and is harvested as part of a cybernetic police
enforcement system, turning him into the machine-man RoboCop! Drama ensues over
RoboCop retaining memories of his human life, holding a grudge against the thugs
who murdered him, and his correct executive manufacturers seeking to replace him
with their own project.
It's a brainless, macho action movie about invincible cops wrecking everybody's
shit, but there's a certain wit and heart to it. Commercial breaks and newscasts
break up the film both to establish plot points, or simply to establish the
futuristic society it takes place in, but they have a very dark humour to them,
satirising the Cold War dread, showing nonchalant attitude to wanton
destruction, death and other issues. They're small inclusions that are easy to
forget about, but they genuinely help craft the atmosphere that surrounds the
film.
Also, for all the corrupt executive backstabbing and crime
clobbering, the human drama plays out very nicely. All sides of the story have
decent, engaging storylines - the OCP company and their internal power
struggles, the police going on strike, and Murphy as he struggles to come to
terms with his identity. You come to see RoboCop shoot motherfuckers, but you
stay because it does have a decent story going on. For an 80s sci-fi action
flick, at lesat.
And really, it's hard to dislike it - it's an action movie icon! RoboCop's a
macho movie powerhouse and it's hard to hate a robot that fills baddies full of
lead in the name of justice.
-
RoboCop 2: One of those movies where I wasn't
expecting anything memorable, but was hoping for at least a decent bit of
entertainment. I'm not sure if it even amounted to that.
A group shilling a drug called Nuke are making things bad for Detroit, and
RoboCop is taken apart by them, but when rebuilt he's filled with new directives
in an attempt to make him a good role model - and a useless policeman.
Meanwhile, OCP are looking to make a new robot police unit, and one of the Nuke
cultists is chosen as its brain.
RoboCop 2 lacks a lot of the punch of the first movie. Basil Poledouris's
booming score is absent; newscasts and advertisements are barely present, thus
losing a lot of the original's satire and fast pace. Heck, RoboCop himself
barely even has a story in this one. A lot of shit happens to him, but he
himself does very little.
The movie begins with him having memories of his wife and child and is seen
driving past their house everyday - his wife is brought in and RoboCop is
effectively forced to deny that he is Alex Murphy. It's a very bitter scene for
RoboCop, and demonstrates just how nasty the OCP execs are... and it's never
brought up again. His wife leaves in tears, Murphy watches after her longingly,
and that's it, no further expansion. A number of plot points in the film really
seek to establish this as a direct continuation of the first one, but this
doesn't add anything to the greater sum of things, and just seems to rub in the
viewer's face, "hey, you interested in this sub-plot, huh? Well TOO BAD. We're
gonna make RoboCop's wife cry."
And again with things that don't go anywhere, RoboCop gets rid
of OCP's family-friendly reprogramming by erasing all of his directives.
All of 'em! No "uphold the law" or anything, it says there's no
directives at all. Does this mean RoboCop will go rampant and have no sense of
right or wrong? Will he look at a human corpse and think that's good enough to
feed a family of four? ... who knows, because it doesn't mean anything! RoboCop
still busts bad guys and shoots motherfuckers like he usually does. It's
probably just shorthand to say that all of the two hundred directives the OCP
gave him are gone, but you'd think something basic like "protect the innocent"
would be nice to have in writing.
There's nothing personal at stake here. There were lots of plots in the first
movie, but they were all tied to Murphy in some way - the police, the criminals,
his manufacturers. Here, there's nothing. The bad guys are just generic drug
dealers who just happen to get the focus. There's a RoboCop 2 who's going to
replace him and has the brain of one of the dudes Murphy killed, but he had
little conflict with the guy as a human, and fighting him as a robot offers no
real engagement outside of neat stop-motion robot animation.
The film is two hours long, and although it doesn't drag, it
does feel a bit slow-paced, especially without the frequent newscasts casting a
bit of light on the weird future society. Basically, it's missing a lot of what
the original so engaging, and has very little (if any) charms of its own to make
up for it. It's pretty funny to see RoboCop trying to act like a good role model
rather than a godless killing machine. Seeing him ride a motorcycle makes me
chuckle. There's a scene in an arcade that's fun for game nerds to identify the
wares, and the aforementioned stop-motion robot animation is bound to appeal to
folks who appreciate the art.
But aside from those very niche draws, there's really not much worth seeing.
It's the sort of thing you can have on in the background, watch a few bits, and
know you're not missing an awful lot.
-
RoboCop 3: My expectations were really
low after the rather pointless second instalment, but I was pleasantly surprised
at how fun this was!
"Urban Rehabilitators" are in force to destroy housing and shuttle people to
camps in preparation for building a new city, and the residents are fighting
back. After the head of the organisation kills his partner, RoboCop sides with
the 'rebels' to fight for what is right, rather than what is lawful. Meanwhile,
a new brand of robot mercenary is out to snuff RoboCop.
RoboCop 2 lacked action, lacked humour, lacked heart... lacked a bit of
everything, frankly. The third one can't restore it all, but it makes a decent
effort. RoboCop is made a proper character again - he's much more human this
time around, having more emotional scenes and a lot more snappy one-liners, and
is taken in new directions. Having to disobey his lawful directives in favour of
what he, as a human being, believes is right, is a very cool direction to take,
and seeing some human interaction with the girl and his partner helps round out
his character again. There's also a lot more whimsy to him this time - in the
sense that he's got some wicked firepower to shoot motherfuckers. He not only
has a machine gun arm replacement with built-in flamethrower, but he gets a
freakin' flight suit. RoboCop with jets and smart bombs! It is exactly
the sort of incredibly badass imagery that makes you pump your fist and exclaim,
"fuck yeah!" And let's face it, that's what you should do anytime you see
RoboCop. He's an icon worthy of fist pumping.
There's a more light-hearted vibe this time - the gore isn't
anywhere near as brutal in the other films, and combined with the rather toy-etic
enhancements to RoboCop (and the fact a kid is a main character,
I suppose), it looks like it aims for a slightly younger audience. And to
be honest, I'm almost surprised they didn't do that sooner - RoboCop kicks ass,
man, and he's the sort of icon kids love. He's an image crafted for coolness,
and it's no wonder everything from anti-smoking ads to fried chicken commercials
seek him out. It results in a film that's a lot less gritty with a lot less
satire... and I'm not sure what to use as a positive point, but if it gave us
RoboCop with a jetpack and a flamethrower, I ain't complaining.
It's also nice that after two movies, we finally get to see the Detroit police
actually do something rather than strike, and get to show their practical, human
side by throwing away their badges and defending the town from the
Rehabilitators. On the downside, it does kind of round off all the
already-established plots - the OCP go down the tubes, Detroit is adamantly
protected by RoboCop, and the tin man gets in touch with his human side. It
takes care of everything, but not with a ball-bustingly extravagant conclusion.
It's the sort of movie you walk out of with a smile on your face, and then later
think back on it and go, "it wasn't that great." It ain't a perfect
movie, and it's still nowhere near the first one in terms of quality, but it's a
fun ol' romp, which is more than I can say for the last film.
20/April/2012
I watched Inception on April 13. Here's a review from
then!
Heh. The internet has been raving up and down about it since its release...
what, two years ago? I can't even count the amount of Cracked articles there are
about it, and apparently dubbing something mildly paradoxical as "[noun]-CEPTION"
is the height of internet hilarity. Not to mention all the discussions that have
erupted over it. I suppose there's good reason to be nuts over it.
But you know me, I don't really do anything everyone else is doing. Skyrim?
Not for me - yet! Inception? Pfft, please! Using a combination of male
and female sexual organs for pleasure and/or producing offspring? God,
everyone's been doing that! Let me know when people have found a way of
making our genitalia into short-wave radio transmitters and then I'll be
interested.
There's also the matter of how I'm crazy biased against
Christopher Nolan. Okay, I've only seen his Batman films, but he's got a
very signature vibe; which is good and bad. He's got an eye for artistic
direction and dark themes, which is good. All of his films seem to focus around
boring white guys in suits. Which is bad. Seriously, Batman Begins was a
stinker
of a movie, and it didn't help how everyone was a white guy in a suit.
Give one of them gloves or something, a moustache, anything to make them
identifiable! Inception does give us the privilege of two main characters
who aren't white: a Chinese business man and an Arabian chap. They're pretty
neat and identifiable. And you can spot Leonardo DiCaprio's gormless face from
the back side of Mars, so identifying him isn't an issue. Everyone else,
though...
Also, female characters! Have any of Nolan's movies had actual female characters
with... well, character? There were women in the Batman flicks, but I
sure as hell can't remember who they were or what they did, if anything. Heck,
do his male characters have character, for that matter? Inception's girl
student isn't a character so much as an audience viewpoint, something for the
characters to dump exposition on, and hell if I can
tell what Leo's wife was meant to be. But I digress.
Everyone knows the basic plot, right? Dudes enter dreams of
people and... do shit. Chinese businessman pays Leo and his cronies to put an
idea into a business heir's head, because apparently that's totally what the
world needs - more white guys in suits doing stuff in suits. There's like three
dreams within a dream so they can really establish their idea plant, but they've
got the heir's mental defences to deal with and also Leo's head being fucked up
and having his wife enter the picture. Craziness ensues.
I watched it last night (Friday, Apr 13!) and my mind was
elsewhere so I can't remember the complicated ins and outs of the story, but
let's face it, when every concept in the film is also in a
Scrooge McDuck comic strip, it's not going to be that weird - it's just
Inception has more white guys in suits expo-dumping. It's a hard movie to
watch when the entire bloody internet has talked about it - I knew the themes, I
knew the concepts, I even knew the ins and outs of the apparently ambiguous
ending (it's only the fate of Leonardo DiCaprio, so who cares?)
before I had watched it,
so it was pretty damn spoiled for me.
I enjoyed it enough, though. I'm always a sucker for stories
focusing on dreams and the psyche, and Leo's sub-plot about memories and his
wife was an unexpected inclusion, if a bit hard to follow. There was some pretty
creative stuff, like the time extension of dreams, how the sleeping environments
alter the dream environments, and so on. A lot of great eye candy - the
gravity-shifting hotel brawl was great, as well as whoever-it-was's plan to
'kick' everyone awake without gravity using an elevator shaft.
My personal beef is that there wasn't enough of that. A number of dream
environments just seemed pretty ordinary. I suppose that's an inherent
problem of a film about dreams - it's never going to seem as magical if you were
dreaming them yourself. My brother tells me a lot of this action film-esque
dreams, and hearing him describe them is always intriguing, even if the cynical
side of me is thinking "you watched 28 Days Later recently, didn't you?"
Seeing similar environments in film... just isn't the same, because it's films
like that that inspire said dreams in the first place. A film of a dream
inspired by a film isn't going to work as well as it is in your head. Dreaming
that you and your crew are infiltrating an arctic base to open a vault sounds
like it'd be a pretty nifty way to spend your sleeping hours, but it's the sort
of thing we've already seen in a dozen James Bond films - except usually the
white guys in suits in those films were a bit more recognisable.
Again with the white guys in suits, the dreams were very...
contained. Very controlled. That's the point, I guess - you can't do
missions if the dream is contorting and shifting theme in a
state-of-consciousness manner. There's one scene where a white guy in a suit
(he's got facial fuzz - I guess he's meant to be British, but I
can hardly tell) chastises his comrade for trying to take care of enemies
with a mere assault rifles, and then lifts a grenade launcher from off-screen.
Now that's intriguing. They're in a dire situation where the mental
defences are locking them down, so it only makes sense to 'will' a solution into
existence. A concept that would be hard to carry without just spawning deus ex
machinas every five seconds, or like a childrens' game of cowboy. "You can't
shoot me, I've got bullet-proof armour!" "Nuh uh, my bullets are bullet-proof!"
"Nuh- uh!" "Nuh uh!" And so forth.
I enjoyed the film. The plethora of spoilers did hamper the experience, and my
petty Christopher Nolan bias probably didn't help, but it was nice to see what
all the fuss was about. Didn't do much for me, though.
17/April/2012
Oh, hey. I went away to England for nine days to see my brother (who for those who like internet continuity, I mentioned was moving to England way back in early 2011). I thought of leaving a message, but I figure, who would notice? The blog's been totally untouched for weeks at a time at this rate, and I don't have the excuse of "I'm busy". I don't think watching more movies than I can remember, playing Rayman Origins all week and attending not one but two barbeques qualifies as being "busy". That's more akin to "chillin' the hell out".
I had a good time, t'was fun catching up with my brother and seeing the English way of life. I admit my perception of England, in comparison to Northern Ireland, can be summed up as "big and awkward." Huge roads, huge buildings, huge gardens, and really awkward navigation. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing - it gives the place a bit of identity, I guess! Mind you, that might have been because I was staying just outside the London region. I did visit York a few years ago, but it was basically Belfast except bigger and just as unappealing.
But I didn't go to England to see England, I went there to see
my bro! And I certainly enjoyed catching up with him.
... I don't think there's much else to say, I guess. Boring brother stuff,
y'know.
I did write up stuff on the movies I watched and books I read, so I might chuck
them in as blog entries throughout the week. I wrote a long ramble on
Inception where I stretched out one joke across as many paragraphs and
possible. Let's see much ire that'll generate!
Today's observation: Who the hell put a lemon in the dishwasher?