Review: Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice

I've come to the conclusion in life that it's best to completely skip all trailers, commercials, hype ads, and other media when it comes to things I think I might enjoy.    I'm willing to watch one trailer to simply see what a movie might offer and learn that it might actually be something I want to know more about, but beyond that there's so little value to them beyond "revealing the entire plot."

However, I did say in that previous post that I would see both movies, and I've lived up to exactly half of that promise by going out and seeing the story of a guy with an armored suit battle a guy who's a walking atomic powerhouse.

So what did I think?  Well, look after the cut, and be prepared for spoilers.

Erik's Favorite Things: Millennium Actress

If you ever want to see me get really close to crying in public, ask me what it was like watching Perfect Blue for the first time.  I'll probably sit in a corner and gently rock back and forth, mutter to myself, and seem unresponsive to the outside world, but I can't promise there wouldn't be any tears.

What I'm saying is that the first directing work of Satoshi Kon messed me up pretty bad.  The fact that I keep going back to him for other projects he's worked on tells you just how amazing his works are as well, because I don't tend to go back to things that strongly disagree with me.

Millenium Actress was Satoshi Kon's second directorial project, the story of an actress who vanishes at the peak of her career, and the small documentary crew exploring her life to find out why.

Westworld

When I first heard of Westworld years ago, I thought it was an interesting gimmick.  An amusement park where the attractions flip out and attempt to murder everybody present because of the uncontrollable nature of chaos theory?  By the mid-90s, I had already seen that story done so well that it's stuck with me ever since.

Wait, that can't be right.  Anyway.

Finally, just recently, I sat down and watched Westworld.  The announcement that a television series featuring Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris piqued my interest in it again, and I figured that it was such a staple of science fiction that the fact I hadn't seen it yet was a pretty huge blemish on my "nerd cred."

I want that poster.

Top Eleven: Tips For Steven Spielberg Regarding Filming Ready Player One

So, the Ready Player One movie is happening.  While I realize that my giving tips to Steven Spielberg about movie making is akin to Tommy Wiseau giving acting tips to Marlon Brando, there are a few things that I remember from my time listening to the audiobook version that have stuck with me, things that I don't think worked in a medium that wasn't "words on paper/screen" and are things I hope the movie would address.

Because I'm sure there's a good movie in there somewhere.  I'm just not 100% confident in Hollywood's history of portraying video games in any way, shape, or form.

But maybe I'm just cynical.

So here's eleven tips that, at least to me, should be kept in mind while creating a film that's one part huge "anybody can be a hero" adventure in the vein of Star Wars and Harry Potter, and one part "look at all the pop culture references we can make!"

Jurassic World

I really wish there had been someone else in the room when I watched Jurassic World, because when I watched it I really, really wanted to pause it and ask someone if they thought something I spotted meant anything or if I was just overthinking things.  The movie doesn't really present itself as anything other than mindless action and witty comments set up to show off a fancy new set of CGI dinosaurs, but I find it hard to believe that any movie Steven Spielberg takes part in wouldn't have at least some thought put behind it.

So if you wanted me to simply say "oh, man, DINOSAURS ARE AWESOME YOU GUYS" then I'm sorry, but you're stuck with me once again breaking down a movie in ways that I don't think it was meant to be broken down.

However, dinosaurs are totally awesome.

Heavenly Sword - The Movie

There are times a project comes together that is made up of individual pieces that simply scream to me "this is going to be absolutely wonderful."  It's destined to wind up my "best of the year" list and all I need to do is simply sit back and partake in its splendor.  A writer I love and an artist I love will come together to draw a comic book featuring characters I love to read about, and I wind up with Matt Fraction's run on Hawkeye.  A stellar cast comes together with amazing directors and producers and you can wind up with, well, any of the movies that found their way onto my best of the year list.  Writers finally hit their strides and I get amazing novels.

So let's look at the puzzle pieces here:

We have an animated movie.
Anna Torv (Fringe) voices the heroine, a sexy red-haired acrobatic woman wielding a powerful sword.

Alfred Molina (you know, the guy I just talked about being amazing) playing the villainous king.

Other voices by Thomas Jane (y'know, the Punisher), Nolan North (everything), Ashleigh Ball (Black Lagoon, Applejack AND Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony), and Barry Dennen (so much stuff on Broadway).

A story line involving revenge via massive battles against swarms of enemies, requiring a deft director's eye to choreograph complex fight sequences since this is based on a fighting game that essentially looked at God of War and went "yes, everything from that, just make the lead a woman."

Written by Todd Farmer, a guy whose extensive career includes... hold on, I don't actually know this guy.  Let's see what else he wrote.... okay, he wrote... Drive Angry, The Messengers, My Bloody Valentine 3-D...and Jason X.  As in "the one where Jason goes into space."

You know what?  I'm going to save all of you some time if you want to bail from this article.  This movie's terrible.  It's just awful.  The rest of this post is going to just be me ripping it apart and bemoaning the fact that I wasted an hour and a half of my life when I could have been doing anything else and it would have amounted to more, including "licking random mosses growing outside to see if they're toxic."

What's Up, Doc?

Several years ago I had the pleasure of watching the movie Bringing Up Baby, one of the best screwball comedies I've ever seen.  Starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, it's the story of a paleontologist (played by Grant) who gets caught up in the world of a free-spirited young lady (Hepburn) who needs his help dealing with a tame leopard, a missing dinosaur bone, and her growing fancy of him.  He just wants to finish building his brontosaurus, secure funding for his museum, and marry his secretary (all in one day!).

I'm seriously underplaying the story, but it's a madcap romp (and how often do you get to say that these days?) that builds and builds through the entire film until you're laughing throughout the ending of it.  It has great improvisations, sharp humor, and wonderful slapstick sensibilities with two extremely classy actors leading the way.  Cinecollage.net describes a screwball comedy as "sophisticates gone silly," and that truly is what that movie represents.

In 1972, a spiritual successor came out starring Barbara Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, and Madeline Kahn called What's Up, Doc?  I watched it over the holidays, and while I found it to be a great successor to Bringing Up Baby, I think it slipped a few times while trying to reach such lofty goals.

Review: The Artist

I caught this movie several weeks ago on a bus ride from Boston to Portland.  It was on a small television, and the sound and music were 3/4 of a second out of sync.  I was exhausted after a long flight, clinging to my carry-on bag despite having plenty of room around me, and pretty much ready to fall asleep, but instead I watched a silent movie that just happened to win an Academy Award.

I can see why this movie won, even with all the technical issues, it was still amazing to watch.

Review: The Shop Around The Corner

When I visited my family, we tried to find a holiday- themed movie to put on one day, and we went searching through the "free movies on demand" feature that my parents have.  There were a lot of downright terrible offerings, but we spotted one movie buried deep that I was surprised to find wasn't being listed near the top as a great holiday movie.

Maybe that's because it's only directly related to Christmas in the same sense that Die Hard is a Christmas movie in that they both "happen to happen around that time of year."

It's also a movie I'm not sure you could remake and keep exactly as it is, because if you did it now, there would probably be some concerns as to whether or not what you're doing is in good taste, but I can't for the life of me find it in myself to complain about the same issue in this film.

No, it's not Blazing Saddles.  It's The Shop Around The Corner.

Review: Ex Machina

This movie.  You guys.  This movie.

Okay, look, I love a good science fiction movie.  I think "fantastic future technology" has become more than just a regular "genre" of movie, it's become something you can tell any kind of story in.  You can tell romances (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Time Traveller's Wife, Wall-E), you can tell adventures (Star Wars, The Matrix, Terminator, Wall-E), and you can tell horror (Alien, The Thing, Predator, Wall-E).

But there are very few "science fiction" movies willing to spend more time on the "science" than they are the "fiction."  Hollywood doesn't like to tackle big new ideas that often, so while something like In Ti- ...hold on, I never reviewed In Time?  Okay, that'll be happening this week.  Anyway, while you might have something like Moon every now and again taking an idea and expanding on it until it becomes a complete story in its own right, more often than not you have something that has to abide by the rules of Hollywood storytelling.  You can't challenge the viewer too much, you need explosions to hold their interest, and special effects trump characterization.

Then something like Ex Machina quietly slips by.  You catch a glimpse of it in all the movie hype about other, bigger blockbusters that the critics inevitably pan, but it isn't until later that you start to hear the rave reviews and realize there's something out there you have to see.

So, since I had a long flight ahead of me several weeks ago, I finally downloaded it off Amazon Prime and watched it.

Holy crap, everybody.  This movie is amazing.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li Part 2

I will not fear, fear is the mind killer.  I will not fear, fear is the mind kil- oh, hi!

What was I- you know what, never mind that.  We were getting back into Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, a movie so bad it only sports a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Let's put that into context: DOA has a 34%, meaning one in three people went "eh, it's okay I guess."  Out of a hundred people, you couldn't put together a baseball team out of people who liked this movie.

It's rather bizarre, too, because as a character, Chun-Li fits perfectly into a martial arts film.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

Not too long ago, I took a close look at the Street Fighter movie starring Jean-Claud Van Damme, Raul Julia, and Kylie Minogue.  It was awful.  It butchered what little story the video game had, twisted characters into unrecognizable versions of themselves, and had writing so incomprehensible that I'm still not sure some of the facial reactions weren't from people hearing the lines read out loud for the first time.

But you know what movie it's apparently significantly better than?

For the record, I was going to post a picture of the DVD cover of Bloodrayne here, but I assume you all read the title to this post, so it didn't seem worth it.

Review: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

I have a pretty heavy history with Star Wars.  I wasn't old enough to see the original trilogy in theaters, but I distinctively remember my family having a copy of Return of the Jedi on a VHS tape that I don't know if it was a copy of another VHS tape or what, but I remember watching that over and over again growing up.  When I finally watched the other two, I consumed them just as quickly and fell deep in love with the universe that George Lucas created.

I played the West End Games version of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game so much I had multiple sourcebooks memorized.  I have a collection of action figures never taken out of their packaging in a box somewhere.  I own the R2-D2 phone.  It sits on a shelf at my office.  Without batteries, of course, or it would be going off all the time from people just wanting to see it "one more time."

But I was one of the many burned by the prequels to the point where I didn't see Revenge of the Sith until the early 2010s.   It wasn't my Star Wars any more, it was meant for a new generation who loved it just as much as I loved the originals.  I was okay with that.  I was ready to pass on the torch and move on.

Then they announced Episode VII, and I was torn.  I was hurt before, but could the series bring me back?  Would it be like when I was young and wanted to be Luke Skywalker?

Yes, I know all the "cool" kids wanted to be Han, but I wanted to be Luke.  He got a lightsaber, you guys.  And a robot hand!  Robot hands are awesome!

Hellboy

I need to be honest here.  Up until today, I've never seen the full movie Hellboy.  I've seen snippets of it here and there.  I know that it's one of the movies that really helped launch the career of Guillermo Del Toro (along with Blade II and Pan's Labyrinth).  I know it's the movie that returned Ron Perlman to his "several hours in the make-up chair" roots that stemmed from Beauty and the Beast.

But being able to genuinely discuss the plot?  ...not so much, because I had no idea what happened in it.

I know what you're saying.  "But Erik," you're exclaiming in disbelief, "didn't you say you loved Hellboy in your blog post about giant robots and giant monsters?"  Yes, I did, and I acknowledge that sentence could very well be misleading, so I'm asking for permission to take it back.  It should have been "I loved what I saw of Hellboy, and the fact that he's embraced strange stories such as that and is willing to elevate them to another entertainment medium."  That line in that blog post was an unintentional lie, and a blemish on my record.

But that's all changed.

...because I've watched it.

Okay, this intro has pretty much stalled, let's get into the movie itself.

The Big Hit

After suffering through the disappointment that was Requiem For The Phantom I wanted to sit back and watch something fun.  Something that had likable characters, an interesting plot with some fun twists, and great character interaction.  I wanted interesting set pieces, goofy action, and sexy femme fatales who could hold their own with the boys.  I wanted loud guns, fast cars, and dangerous stunts.

So with all that in mind, I went to a movie that I had fond memories of watching once on TV, and if I can have fond memories of watching a movie after it's been on TBS,

So I sat down and watched The Big Hit.

Beasts Of The Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is one of those movies you always mean to see one day but just never get around to it.  Nominated for best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, and best actress (setting the record for youngest actress to ever be nominated), it won dozens of other awards from film organizations around the world.  It doesn't have huge action sequences, there's little in the way of CGI (aside from a few notable exceptions), and the cast aren't household names, but you always figured "hey, if I saw it on TV, I might stop and watch it."

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a movie everybody should see, if just because I've found myself thinking about it regularly since viewing it three days ago.  I find myself trying to talk to myself about metaphors involving giant beasts, and where poverty ends and self-sufficiency begins.  Where does pride screech to a halt and madness take over?  How can there be people who look just like people I see every day who speak a language I (almost) completely understand, but their ideas about how the world works are so foreign to my own despite the fact that we live in the same country?

All this coming from a movie about a small girl, her father, and a huge storm.

Review: Bangkok Adrenaline - Part Two

Okay, so try to follow along with me as I describe the plot so far.

We start with four friends.  One of whom is a world-class martial artist, one of whom is the brains of the group and a high-quality marital artist, one of whom is a mountain of a man portrayed as being dumb as a post and always hungry, and one who I swear is the cause of everything wrong in this world, somehow, and has less character sympathy than your standard Nazi in an Indiana Jones movie.

At least the Nazi might have a family out there somewhere that cares about him.

After falling in debt to a local small time crime boss (a guy who breaks fingers over $90 American money), these four losers decide their best plan of action is to kidnap the daughter of a local millionaire/billionaire/somethingaire.  However, between their own incompetence and the fact that Irene's father (she's the girl in this situation) is apparently a "one man mob boss," things are even worse than before.

Irene's two bodyguards manage to attach a tracking device to the, quote-unquote "good guys" of the film, the extremely skilled martial artist (Dan) and Irene have a brief "meet cute" where angelic voices sing, and we left off after the group's leader (Mike) just learned something from a bondage fan at a leather club about Irene's father, leading Mike to provoke the father into admitting he'd rather have Irene dead than rescued because of...reasons, I guess.

Now, with a hit squad on the way, Irene's bodyguards closing in, and our four male leads having no idea what to do next, you might be thinking "wow, Erik, this sounds like an even dumber version of the Mark Wahlberg/Lou Diamond Phillips/Christina Applegate movie The Big Hit" to which I say "yes, I realized that as well."

So let's jump back in and see if we can't stomach our way through it.

Review: Bangkok Adrenaline - Part One

Every now and again, somebody in Hollywood who has a job that isn't "screenwriter," "producer," or "director" gets the idea, "hey, I work in movies, I could probably make a movie!  How hard could it really be?"  It's because of ideas like this (and the fact that people aren't quick to stop those who have them) that we have movies like Swept Away, a movie so bad that Roger Ebert's review starts with the following sentence:

""Swept Away" is a deserted island movie during which I desperately wished the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one."

Fortunately, not everybody who has this idea is Guy Pierce.  Many actors have eventually made the successful leap into film production.  Action heroes, dramatic stars, even people who voiced cartoon characters have all moved on to create instead of simply act in a film.  Many of them have been quite successful and quite good.

Then there's Bangkok Adrenaline, a movie I can really only describe as "some really neat scenes of people being kicked in the face mixed in with people who wouldn't be cast as actors in any high school production of anything.  Anywhere."

I've had this movie sitting on the shelf for several years now, waiting for just the right time to watch it.

It turns out there is no right time.

That's right, we're doing a scene by scene synopsis, in the spirit of Dead or Alive, Barb Wire, and Iron Sky.  Because if I had to suffer through watching it, then you have to suffer through reading it.

Let's get started.

Review: The Tale Of Princess Kaguya

Sometimes I think Hollywood gets a bit too caught up in their fancy new toys.  Over the past few weeks I've seen multiple "did you catch these background details" clips on Youtube regarding films like Big Hero 6, I have to say I honestly don't care if they managed to put a statue dedicated to Olaf in San Fransokyo- actually, scratch that.  I -do- care because it makes no sense.

It's a post for a future date, but to me, an Easter Egg only works if it has a meaning and fits in the context of the story.  The hints about the snitch in Reservoir Dogs, the clues in Fight Club, the hidden language in Futurama, they all fit in the context of the story.  Just tossing in a hint of another movie might be cute (the hat from Spinal Tap showing up in the kid's room in The Princess Bride) but to have something that just doesn't fit annoys me.

I think part of the problem is that CG is a lot easier these days, allowing people to cram as many details as they want into any given scene.  You start needing to fill every empty spot or it feels like a waste of space.  I think this takes away from certain films, because you can get overwhelmed by the constant flood of information.  Video games have the same issue sometimes, where they spend so much time making sure it's as detailed and gorgeous as possible, but the game play suffers.

Then something simple comes along and shocks the system by remembering just how great something can be without needing to cram everything possible into a scene.  Such is the case with The Tale of Princess Kaguya, quite possibly the most gorgeous and visually stunning movie I've seen since Life of Pi.

Review: Big Hero 6

I'm starting to think that "superhero" movies are starting to turn into a broader genre of film.  At one point, it was simply "hero A shows up, discovers villain B, destroys villain B."  Batman, Iron Man, Thor, Superman, Spider-Man, they all followed a pretty standard formula.  It's only in more recent years we've seen even the slightest variation of this in mainstream Hollywood.  The movies for Captain America were more "war movie" and "spy thriller" than standard superhero films.  It's not common, but I think studios are starting to realize that you can tell other kinds of stories in worlds where superheroes happen to exist.

Big Hero 6 is such a movie, taking a formula about "a group of heroes band together to fight evil" and twisting it around into a story about grief, loss, and morality.

As well as "once you get him away from his brothers, Damon Wayans, Jr. can actually be fun to have in a movie."