Starring Jake Gylala-hall Donnie Darko, it was better than I expected and kept me engrossed from beginning to end. Kind of implausible ending but hey. There are worse ways to spend 90 minutes.
Gemma Arterton's a decent actress. I didn't notice her talent in that shitfest Quantum of Solace, and I certainly didn't notice how attractive she is before this movie. She's far, far too pale in Quantum--get that woman some sunlight!
I have difficulty seeing any character played by Roger Allam as anything but distilled evil, even though his character in this one isn't, but is just a major sleazebag. This is probably because I was introduced to him in V for Vendetta, and he played his role so well.
we saw Dark Shadows yesterday. It was not quite as good as I was expecting it to be.
I really hated the fight scene at the end.
It was better than I expected, though, admittedly, my expectations were rather low.
In Dark Shadows, the Tim Burton send-up of the early 1970s television series of the same name, Johnny Depp played the lead character, Barnabas Collins, who had been entombed for over 200 years before accidentally being unearthed during a construction project. Drama unfolds. Hilarity ensues. Predictability assured. Christopher Lee, who is 90 years old today, made a brief appearance as a fishing fleet captain, a nod to his playing Dracula in a number of films from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Also making a cameo appearance somewhere in there was Johathan Frid, the actor who played Barnabas Collins in the television series. Frid just died in April, at age 87.
The movie paid homage to pretty much the entirety of the tv series. Accompanying Depp in this movie was Michelle Pfeiffer as the 21st century family matriarch, Eva Green as the antagonist witch Angelique, Jackie Earl Haley as manservant Willie Loomis, Tim Burton's wife Helena Bonham-Carter as the family's psychiatrist, and others, including Chloe Grace Moretz in another Kick-Ass role as the rebellious 15 year old girl, who harbors a secret that doesn't really make a damned bit of difference to the story line and had no place at all in the original series, but okay.
Will Tim Burton ever run out of pancake makeup and black eye shadow or did he buy it in industrial quantities at Costco?
Will Tim Burton ever make a movie without Helena Bonham-Carter in it?
I give it a solid 2.78 stars out of five, worth a watch, but only at matinee prices.
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Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields
I wanted to see Snow White and the Huntsman until I realized that Charlize Theron, as the evil queen, would be asking the magic mirror if she was the fairest in the land and it would answer "There is another who is more fair, Snow White." I'm not sure I can suspend reality enough to believe Kristen Stewart is prettier than Charlize Theron. Unpossible. However, fair as in lack of exposure to any rays of sunlight either literally or figuratively, okay, I guess that is possible.
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Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields
Having watched a bit of Dark Shadows as a teen, I have to say those plots worked better in a two hour movie than they did dragged out over years of TV time. Also, I recognized David Selby in his cameo, though not Jonathan Frid. I did catch that the whole group at the party were from the original show, but Selby was the only one I picked out individually.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Men In Black 3. It was fun and moved quickly. It took me awhile to place the actor who played the villain. Great make-up, but his voice eventually gave him away.
WARNING: If you are a biologist you may not like yourself after seeing this movie. I'm just saying.
Where did we come from? is a great question for science fiction to ask. Science fiction can play with that idea, have a little bit of fun with it, maybe find a nice answer - or at least encourage readers and viewers to explore the idea for themselves in a sort-of more grounded way than philosophy. One of the imaginative ideas to come along is that of the ancient astronaut. A race of highly advanced explorers who seed certain planets as they gallivant around the galaxy has a romantic feel to it.
It'd be grand if this was the big idea underwriting Prometheus. But as it is, it's only a part of what's going on in the movie. In fact, there seems to be too many competing stories riding through the film. One minute it's every bit as tense and disturbing as Alien, the next it's trying to be a dramatic spy-like movie. The competing genres work against one another making the decent whole less than the sum of the parts.
The acting is solid. Fantastic actors of our day do a great job with what they have. The cinematography is well done. Most everything makes sense when you have all the information; but the stitching of all the parts is a bit ... underwhelming. (Not the editing of the scenes, but the putting together of the parts to the whole.)
If you've been waiting to see this movie, I say go. You won't be that disappointed. There is some let down compared to the build up we've had for the last year, but it's not a bad movie, per se. It's just not the great movie we want. Anyone on the fence about it, wait for the small screen release and On Demand it.
Awhile back I picked up a DVD that has Vincent Price's House On Haunted Hill and The Last Man On Earth together on one disc. I've always loved HOHH and mainly got it for that, but whilst bored I finally got around to seeing Last Man.
I wouldn't call it a great film by any stretch, but certainly a good one, for what it is. While I never read I Am Legend, the Internet has told me a kajillion times what the book's "twist" ending is. Said twist is not captured perfectly (it's actually pretty much there, but the film oddly just sort of tosses it out with almost no fanfare and then doesn't explore the implications at all), the Vincent Price film adheres more closely to it than The Omega Man (which lol, I have to see that silly thing again) or the Will Smith film (which lol, I ... don't).
What's most interesting about the film, though, is that it's not so much a horror film as a bleak, saddening character study. I half-expected hamhanded melodrama, but for the most part it was genuinely heart-wrenching. The loss this guy suffers is far more likely to give me nightmares than anything a "scary" film could do. The version I have is not well-restored at all, but the fuzziness of the picture fits the tone perfectly. Glad I saw it, but not in any hurry to see it again.
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"Her eyes in certain light were violet, and all her teeth were even. That's a rare, fair feature: even teeth. She smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction." - Eleanor of Aquitaine
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Last edited by Sock Puppet; 06-11-2012 at 09:55 PM.
Reason: "without almost no fanfare." :facepalm:
It was better than I expected! Tom Cruise was pretty much awesome, even Sou begrudgingly admitted that he was good (Sou is a massive Tom Cruise hater). The plot was pretty much awful like most musicals, but the good music and quality actors made up for it. I wouldn't say quality acting in all cases *coughZeta-Jonescough* but overall the cast and the music made it an enjoyable experience.
I would say that if you grew up in the 80's and don't mind musicals, go see it. You should enjoy it.
WARNING: If you are a biologist you may not like yourself after seeing this movie. I'm just saying.
Here is Rob's Prometheus FAQ on Topless Robot. Everything he says is pretty close to right. To boil it down if you're really lazy, he mostly captures the frenetic hodge-podgeness of the movie. It's "pretty and confusing."
Did we see the same movie? Seriously, I haven't disliked a movie as much as Prometheus in quite awhile.
Rain and a need to wash some clothes drove me out of the woods. While I was in town, I thought I'd catch a movie. Unfortunately, it was Prometheus.
I can forgive the fact that the premise is basically a glorification of ID. [I read an interview with Ridley Scott which made it pretty clear that he's a big believer in Intelligent Design; that explains a lot.] I can, grudgingly, forgive the fact that none of the writers seem to have had anything better than a third-grade-level understanding of evolutionary biology, human anatomy & physiology, genetics, or astronomy. I can even forgive the fact that the movie had so many plot holes that it really should have been called Swiss Cheese: The Movie.
[In fairness, I read somewhere that Ridley Scott intended this to be a 2-part movie. If this is the case, maybe Part 2 will tie up some of the loose ends.]
I can even bite my tongue and accept the hoary, anti-intellectual, and frankly insulting Hollywood cliché of a main character believing something ridiculous on faith alone, in defiance of all logic and mountains of counterevidence -- and ultimately being proved absolutely correct.
But what I can't forgive is the fact that virtually every character is really, amazingly, annoyingly, unbelievablystupid. By the halfway point of the movie, I was hoping they'd all get killed, because people that stupid really don't belong in the gene pool.
Practically every plot point depended on the fact that the major characters couldn't scrape together 5 working brain cells between them. Seriously.
The original Alien managed to feature well-defined characters who weren't stupid. But in this movie, the only remotely well-defined character was the android; practically everyone else was a drooling idiot.
What a waste ...
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Thanks! I'm back in the woods tomorrow morning, all cleaned up and ready for more. Tomorrow, I'll be enjoying my very favorite waterfall, Linville Falls, and hiking through Linville Gorge.
Next week, I'll get some time with my favorite 14-year-old.
As always seems to happen to me for some reason, quite a few people have approached me to ask me questions about the local flora and fauna. (This morning, on Grandfather Mountain, I happened to come around a bend in the trail as a young girl asked her father what a certain plant was. "I don't know," he told her, "but I bet he does" he continued, seeing me. So, of course, I told them.)
I wonder how many people over the past couple of weeks have wondered why the nice ranger who answered their questions wasn't wearing a Park Service uniform?
I enjoy helping people, but I'm not quite certain why everyone who sees me hiking along in the woods seems to assume that I'm a park ranger. A couple of days ago, some young woman saw me coming and said to (I presume) her husband, "Oh look, here comes a ranger!" So, naturally, I happily gave them lots of (hopefully) interesting information on the local flora.
Cheers,
Michael
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
WARNING: If you are a biologist you may not like yourself after seeing this movie. I'm just saying.
There are exactly two scenes in the movie that I had you specifically in mind when I began mentally writing my blort on Prometheus.
The first is the opening sequences. Both the sacrificial engineer part and the archeologists uncovering the so called invitation. It bugged me throughout the movie, but I forced myself to go along with their premise. In the Prometheusverse (if I may be allowed to call it so), that's just how it's going to be. Once the bitter pill is consumed, horribly did it sit in my stomach.
But, keeping your profession in mind, the far worse culprit was the later scene with the geologist and biologist trapped in the superstructure. You know the scene. I hope you do, because I imagine you watching it through your fingers from facepalming so hard. It's where they are in the room where they first found all the vases and the head of the engineer? But later, after that goo was released into the soil and some hideous snake-beast grew?
Now, on Earth, any biologist worth his weight in salt finds a snake and he'll be able to identify what it is and then know whether or not it's dangerous. But I'd imagine a biologist on an alien planet confronted with a snake like beast, fascinated though he might be at the prospect of discovering this snake like beast would exercise at least a modicum of caution and not approach it as though it were his friendly neighborhood cocker spaniel.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying. The movie was chock full of flaws from a plethora of angles. Despite it all, I didn't dislike it - though I can't explain exactly why. I did try my damnedest to wave you away from it, though!
Those were indeed difficult to swallow, but there was something even worse.
When they discovered that the air inside the construct was (theoretically) breathable, they took their helmets off.
Let me repeat that for emphasis. They're on an alien planet. They know it has an active biosphere. Some of them are biologists who know perfectly well that there are millions and millions of different species of bacteria, protists, fungi, and other infectious organisms on Earth that we're exposed to with literally every breath -- and it's almost-certainly true on this planet as well. Bacteria, protists, fungi, etc. with which they have not coevolved and so would have no resistance to.
And they took their helmets off.
Anyone with any understanding of biology whatsoever would have been very, very aware that this was essentially committing suicide.
It was at that point that I began actively hoping for these people to die and thus do the gene pool a great big favor.
Cheers,
Michael
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Re: Seen Any Good Movies...?
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