Gorgon Reviews

Dumb titles aside, Sinners and Saints does what…well, a lot of movies seem to be doing since Katrina. Apparently a post-Katrina New Orleans is a gritty, bad place to live. Or maybe the gangs are bad there, and the cops are the most dedicated (for not moving?) that they all warrant movies, fictionalizing the neighborhoods.

Even pre-Katrina though, I have found New Orleans “Area” to be yucky. So I hate seeing the same area, just “worse looking” on my movies. Thats all I will say on that!

Hey look, violence!

I am feeling lazy, so here is the plot from IMDB!

In the gritty New Orleans underbelly, beleaguered Detective Sean Riley (Johnny Strong) is trying to cope with the death of his young son and his failed marriage. Facing a probable suspension from the department, Riley is teamed with a young homicide Detective, Will Ganz (Kevin Phillips), to help solve a series of brutal murders that have plunged the city into a major gang war. The two quickly realize there is something much bigger and far more sinister going on than either could have ever imagined.

There is also Costas Mandylor, playing another cop dude, and Method Man, playing a gangster with a disfigured face. I looked very hard for a picture of it, but alas, the internet does not giveth.

I want to describe the brutal murders though. Usually they involve strapping someone to a chair, dousing them in gasoline, and of course, setting them on fire. They keep finding people burned and dead in chairs! That is fucked up. And messy. NO is crazy.

I can’t help but think this is the work of Drew Brees!

The film I only found kind of interesting. The low budget of it really took away from the story from me. Tried to make it seem even grittier than it needed to be. Not a good feeling.

Or I don’t love it from my distaste of the area. One or the other.

Where The Wild Things Are is a “classic children’s book” about nothing at all, really. Just a wild kid, who gets punished, and has a lot of imagination. That is about it. Pretty simple!

And man, his imagination is quite the party.

But theres more. Before he wears the wolf costume, and goes to wild land, Max (played by Max Records) is weird at shit. Starts snowball fights and cries when he loses. Then he bites his mom (Catherine Keener) and gets grounded. Then somehow, WILD LAND.

Lot of weird wild things, mostly looking like the books. And they all seem childish too. The “main one” was voiced by James Gandolfini.

So plot? Eventually Max becomes king, just by saying he is King mostly, and by lying. And he is bad at it. Eventually he is lonely and goes home. The end.

This movie is kind of fucked up. Not at all a kids movie. Kids might like it just because “Ooh, wild people!” in costumes doing stuff. But the kid in the movie is pretty damn near insane. He seemed psychotic to me. He is horrible at home, from what we see, and he is more horrible when he has no one to tell him what not to do. He even seems to laugh at the pain he ends up causing to the wild things.

The wild things are also screwy, they all are just depressed individuals. I am not sure what the movie is going for, but it is not a good feeling, that is for sure. It is very deep, and uncomfortable, and I hated it as it happened.

There is pain in his eyes.

By all means I may have missed the point, but this is definitely not a movie I was hoping to see a giant deeper meaning behind. The only reason I expect a better story from something like Transformers is that they have had series (namely Beast Wars) where about halfway through the first season, the writing in the show kicked it up a huge notch and became a work of art. But this went from kids book to movie, 50~ years later almost.

Just felt odd the whole time, and I did not have a good experience.

Obviously I have a wide arrange of movies readily available to me, and this is one of the first I had the chance to see. I passed it up though, at the time, because I wasn’t yet set in the “Watch everything always, damn it!” mind set. It just looked like it would be dumb, and cheesy. The Warrior’s Way is a nice title, but for a movie like this? Yuck!

Actual scene from movie.

Dong-gun Jang (who will be Yang, from here on out) comes to a small town in the west, pretty empty, pretty much just a circus. He is a member of an assassin group, and wants to be the best swordsman in the entire world. But in doing so, he must defeat every member of an opposing clan, and when he gets to the last member, a baby, he cannot do it. He is outcasted from his own clan, and goes on the run.

At the carnie-town, he meats the mayor (Tony Cox), the local drunk (Geoffrey Rush), and a ill tempered woman (Kate Bosworth). After some time, (and training of some townspeople), The “Colonel” (Danny Huston) comes back to torture the town. He frequently raids them, and kills as he pleases.

Blah blah blah, he helps them fight back, gain the courage they once had. Eventually the assassins also attack, which makes the fight more fair for the town (as the two groups fight), while Yang tries to kill evurrybuddy up in this joint (minus the carnies). Redemption is eventually had. If you want a stupidly long plot summary, for some reason they wrote a book about this movie on Wikipedia.

Awww, look at the baby.

Alright, so the plot is pretty bad. The acting, not the best either. I am pretty sure the entire movie was filmed in front of a green screen too, similar to 300. Nothing seems real, and I think that takes away from the experience of really getting into the movie.

But the fighting. OH MAN THE FIGHTING. The action scenes in this movie are the only thing saving it. Yes, a lot of it becomes “CGI fighting scenes”, but they spent a lot of work on them. Probably all of their work on them. Even the small skirmishes were visually entertaining in the movie.

I am not saying this makes it a great movie, by all means no. But usually a “2 out of 4” means it is okay, or worthy of only one watch (as you probably wont want to see it again). This is more so the “one and done” method, not the decent method. I’d say watch it cheaply if you can for the fight scenes, with a bunch of people. You will go “ooh” and “aah” like trained seals.

The Roommate tries to capture that niche audience of people who have ever had a roommate. Which I would guess is a lot of people. It takes the sentence “You think your roommate is bad, well check out this bitch!” and runs with it.

Oh god, she is so crazy!

So Minka Kelly goes to college! Yeah! Far from home. Has a dead older sister too. That is important. Her roommate isn’t there when she moves in, so she goes out to party, with other hall mates, like Aly Michalka, a drunk slut, and meets Cam Gigandet, a fray boy in a band.

When she gets back, she hits a bag, and bam! Leighton Meester is all chirpy and whats up! Wooo! So Leighton seems to be needy, and lonely. She wants to hang out a lot, and doesn’t approve of Minka doing bad things. In fact, they made up a social networking thing for their laptops, just to show that she was crazy by already making her roommate in the “best friend” spot.

I feel like that is enough of the plot. Eventually crazier and bad things happen, until (spoiler?) the roommate is killed and they can all go on with their lives.

Here are some things I dislike. Its rating is again PG-13, so although everyone can be promiscuous, and slutty, nothing is shown, so its like a tease the whole film.

Also shit like this. And 2 or 3 shower scenes. What?!

But this movie advocates something also that is horrible, and so you shouldn’t watch it. In the movie we find out that Leighton DOES have a disease/disorder whatever, making her all weird. In fact, apparently it is curable, if she takes pills she will be fine. We learn all of this. It is assumed she never takes the pills though, and that is the problem.

ASSUMED. But also once the discovery of the pills comes up, it is NEVER talked about again. Not even taking the roommate aside, especially if Leighton is fond of Minka, and going “Hey look, lets take the pills” and being there for her, or something. They never tell her to do anything with them. Instead after they find out, more weird stuff happens, so Minka leaves the room for good, causing Leighton to flip out and go real crazy, until she dies.

This movie condones killing people with disorders, even if a cure is readily available.

That is all.

Tina Fey has been in a surprisingly low number of shows/movies, based on how famous she is for her work and writing. Seriously, look at that imdb. Weird right?

I only mention that, because when I went to review Date Night, I noticed I hadn’t tagged her really in anything yet, and that is why. There really isn’t anything there! If I ever review Baby Mama, I’d be pretty much done.

Too bad I have loathed everything Amy Poehler has done, outside of Pars and Rec.

Fey and Steve Carell play a married couple with kids. They are super busy, but they still have time to force themselves to go out and eat, to have date nights! Or else their relationship will get stale. But out of fear, from another couple getting divorced, they decide to spice it up, go out to the city (NYC), wear nice clothes, and eat at Claw, a way fancy place. Without reservations. Dumb. But they are sneaky, they steal someone elses table who isn’t answering, and become the Tripplehorns!

I know right. Scum of the earth. Who the fuck takes someone else reservation?

But when two thugs (Jimmi Simpson and Common (I am mad that is his “name”)) come up to them, thinking they are the Tripplehorns, and demanding a flash drive, shit gets real. Then is a night of running from them, from the cops, and trying to figure out what is actually going on. With the the help of Mark Wahlberg as “private investigator sexy man”, and some help from James Franco and Mila Kunis (the real Tripplehorns), can they not die?

Also what the heck is going on here?

But was it good? This movie was about as slapstick as I would guess, but also more. Tina Fey and Steve did a good job together, very believable, and they both have made a career out of being awkward. This movie also features one of the best stunt driving/chase scenes I have probably ever seen in the last few years. Seriously. The car/taxi thing? Brilli-fuckin-ant. Also laughs were had, but it wasn’t enough to make me want to watch it again. Minus the car scene. Holy shit yeah. Ending wasn’t the best either.

Puncture, title alone, sounds everything like a horror movie. This helped lead me to the assumption that only damn horrors were coming out this week. Do not worry though! It is not a horror! But it is based on a true story (and dedicated to the main character).

It also is about Chris Evans being super serious guys.

Chris Evans is, I guess, tired of playing in super hero movies, so he is instead just playing a regular every day hero. He plays Mike Weiss, a ambulance chaser in Texas with his partner, played by Mark Kassen. They are good at getting their clients payments, even if it involves some shady tactics. Evans also loves the drugs and partying. Getting that coke, sex, and what not, while his partner his happily married and more in control of his life.

Eventually they take a case, from Vinessa Shaw, a nurse who was pricked by a needle at work and received aids. So they have to try and go against a hospital, not their easiest target! Along with this, they also take on the case from a crazy man played by Marshall Bell. He invented the “Safety Point”, a one use needle that is impossible for others to get pricked on after the fact. Apparently 800,000 accidental needle sticks happen a year to nurses alone in the US at that time. Obviously something they want a lot, and something they don’t have. The safety point guy claims that the main needle company is having a monopoly on the business, including bribing doctors for business, regardless of how unsafe it is for their workers.

But yeah, fuck all that, this movie is about Chris Evans, trying to do something good and actually noble once in his life, but you know, also being on drugs. It requires a lot to overcome, especially when he tries to get off said drugs. Hard enough that he has to go against smooth talking Brett Cullen who runs the team of lawyers against him. And that no one else wants to even try to help.

So fucking smooth.

So, despite this being a trueish story from the early 2000s, I think a lot was exaggerated. Including the struggle, and the end result. As an indy film made in the guys honor, it was also used to soapbox a lot of needle issues, and aids. One scene with a guy who might have been a conspiracy nut was pretty pointless, but in there just to point out a different issue that they werent actually fighting for.

But besides that, some pretty good acting, and an okay story. Chris Evans does do a good job, but he just had to be a slacker who wanted to do better, so probably easily doable.

Before watching, I had no idea that Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark was made by Guillermo del Toro, but finding that information out now makes perfect sense. The visua style, the creatures, and the use of a little girl in danger to make a movie.

Pan’s Labyrinth is about a long game of Peek-a-Boo, right?

The story begins sometime long in the past, and it is creepy, so lets ignore that. Bailee Madison is moving into this mansion with her dad, Guy Pearce, and his girlfriend, Katie Holmes. Pace is creepy. Belonged to some past lord a long time ago who did paintings and stuff. They currently have it just to try and sell it to people who love that dead dude. I think I got all of that right

But her room is creepy. She even hears voices. The hidden basement and fireplace is where they come from too, and despite the groundkeepers best wishes, they go down there anyways to check it out. Yeah, then shit eventually starts to go down. More or less, these gremlin/goblin like things (that hate light), used to steal teeth from children and leave money. Or something like that. Also they can turn other people into them, if they do please. So they see Bailee and go balls to the walls nuts. They want her bad. But no one will believe her, since they hide!

And then the horror movie happens. Stuff is creepy, people die, and eventually it concludes. Kind of.

Kind of like rat creatures from Bone.

This is probably the first Horror movie I watched that actually scared me. Most ended up being kind of a joke, or Scream 4, and going for gore over fear. But I am also a self-admitted coward, so who knows, it might be very tame for others. Only thing I would say is that I wish this had more of a story to go with it, and more of a “just them vs the girl” mentality.

There is a very specific narrator voice, for trailers, that is very annoying. I want you to read the next part of the review in that voice.

“Sarah Jessica Parker is a hard working mother! She has a job that requires her to spend a lot of her time, on a moments notice, going other places! Why? Presentations! The most adult-like job that exists in the movies! But she also has two children, and her husband, Greg Kinnear, is about to have a big project at well as work. But if she has to go to NYC to get seduced by Pierce Brosnan, how will she be able to manage her motherly duties and her career? Herp a derp, and also a derp a teedle dum.

This zany comedy also stars Christina Hendricks, Seth Meyers, Olivia Munn, and more of your favorite stars! So derp on over and watch and see as her friends raise up their hands and exclaim, “I Don’t Know HOW She Does It?!” Derp!

(Here is an extreme example.)

That is pretty much how I felt watching this movie. I don’t even care to see if it was based on a book or not, but man, was it not good. Skip, skip, skip to your loo right past this movie.

When someone sees the title Shark Night 3D they will assume certain things about it. One, that there is a a lot of gore, peopl getting ripped up in bloody disgusting ways. Two, if it is about college kids, sex and naked swimming is bound to happen, and then those people will die. Three, probably they will die because of having sex, or doing drugs, or being bad people, not just dying for no reason.

I can say that this movie has none of the three expectations, and for one obvious reason. It is rated PG-13.

WHY THE FUCK IS A MOVIE LIKE THIS RATED PG-13??

This is about all you will get on option 2.

So yeah, group of college kids going to…a lake house! The “main character” is Sara Paxton, from the picture above. She used to live in this area of Louisiana, and left for college to get educated! It shows, because no wone they meet in town seem to have any brains. Not even local sheriff, Donal Logue, or that guy from Grounded For Life.

The main guy, if any, is played by Dustin Milligan, but they also have Joel David Moore, or that guy from Dodgeball / Grandma’s Boy. So yeah. Eventually a shark attack happens. Not sure whats going on. Sharks take out boats too. Other twists and turns. And then it ends, on a very very vague note. Not in “oh man, what happens?” way, but a “okay, they won! Hey look another shark” kind of way. Boring.

Oh no watch out!!!!!!

Also, the sharks in this movie. They look horrible. Fake and bad. Not even scary, just dumb. Obviously CGI’d, and CGI’d badly. Might even make you throw up. Which is a reaction the movie might be going for, since there cannot be any gore.

The plots for the characters and how they die are stupid. One guy, for some reason, wants to get vengeance so badly that he takes a spear and walks into the lake, just to try and fight it. What the hell? His whole character doesn’t make sense.

Usually I give it a 0 only if I am angry at it. While I am not as angry as I normally am for an 0, I am angry that they attempted to do this sort of movie, with the rating restrictions in place.

When I first heard of Contagion, from a movie preview, I was not sure what kind of movie it wanted to be. It really seemed like it wanted to be a “real life horror”, and scary scenes of people panicking, and people dying in horrific ways. Or it could have been a drama about it. Really couldn’t tell.

Well, now I can say it is a Drama like movie about it. No real fear from the audience, just a few “intense” scenes from the panic.

OH GOD. WHY CANT THEY REMAIN CALM?

The story also features a few different plot lines about this virus. Short story, somehow, something happens, and a virus that is pretty easy to kill someone pretty quickly gets out. How? You don’t find out until the end. But the people have seizures and die. You can be immune to it though, like Matt Damon. Which is good, because his wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, kind of dies at the beginning of the movie with it, and he doesn’t want to die as well. Not when he has a daughter who relies on him, and may not be immune.

But that felt like a very minor plot. The more interesting stuff involved Laurence Fishburne and Marion Cotillard, people working at the CDC, trying to find a vaccine/cure, and determine how best to break news of the virus to the public, without inciting riots. The possibility of chaos is more scary than the actual virus, (which probably kills 1 out of 4 people!). Which says a lot. Also, once vaccines are made, how will they be handed out? Do their families get them first, do the rich? Do they do it by birthday? Who knows.

Also there is Jude Law, conspiracy theorist trying to spread the truth about the disease, the vaccine, and the cure, and controlling millions of followers who believe everything he says.

Also, Demetri Martin plays a low level scientist. One who doesn’t make jokes. What?

The last two plots were the most interesting, and thought the Damon plot was just meh. It of course shows why it matters, like everything in the movie. But the ending seemed a bit disappointing. The movie takes place over a long time, even has nifty pop ups saying “Day 144!” and all that shit. Hard to say what is missing from the movie, besides Damon having a bigger role. A lot of it could be considered boring as well, which isn’t the best way to sell a movie. Who knows.

I like parts of it as a “man what if THIS happened” movie, and would like to assume a lot of it is wrong. But eh, probably true. Humans love to riot.