Tag: Sean Bean

SquareEnix has made questionable decisions regarding the Final Fantasy series since SquareEnix became SquareEnix. Square Soft was good, SquareEnix is bad. Having a Final Fantasy X-2, prequel games, MMOs (which have been at least somewhat successful), and turning their games into something that is no longer enjoyable. Final Fantasy XIII wasn’t a good game and was a bad Final Fantasy game. Having two sequels was even more confusing.

This leads us to Final Fantasy XV, which I am pretty sure was supposed to be a game called Final Fantasy Versus, which I first heard was supposed to be like Kingdom Hearts, but without Disney. Fantastic. Anyways, lot of delays, and we have the game now. But for some reason, they wanted to go all out with this release. They have a prequel, special demos, a VR game, and more. But also a goddamn movie. A movie! A movie that takes place at the same time as the game, about different events, with real Hollywood actors getting released in theaters.

I was shocked when I heard about Kingsglaive. I figured I would just not bother with Final Fantasy XV at all, too many parts, too complicated. And surprisingly they thought their movie was good enough to give to critics. Huh. I did not see that coming. Look, I love Advent Children, but most of that comes from FF7 Nostalgia and without it one might not like it. So, I am skeptical going in, but impressed with their confidence.

And of course impressed with their level of CGI detail.

This film takes on the planet of Eos which has a lot of nations that each used to have a powerful crystal, but now only one remains. The kingdom of Lucis has a crystal and they have used it to create a powerful barrier to protect the city and citizens. Another kingdom, Niflheim, has been warring the countryside and attempting to take down Lucas to get the crystal and become the top kingdom.

Final Fantasy XV is about a Prince of Lucis named Noctis, who is not in this movie. He apparently leaves the kingdom to do a video game’s worth of quests. Instead, Kingsglaive is about the King Regis Lucis Caelum (Sean Bean), and his personal body guard of soldiers. These soldiers are all outsiders not from the kingdom and have been granted magical powers to help defend the crystal and yes, they are called the Kingsglaive.

The best soldier is Nyx Ulric (Aaron Paul), a guy who protects his teammates and defies orders to do what is right. He is awesome at killing the Niflheimers (might not be the right term) and the monsters that also attack the city. But because they are still losing, the King is going to sign a peace treaty and give up some territory to protect the main city. But, but but…that territory is where these soldiers come from! Ugh!

Also involved is a princess, Lunafreya (Lena Headey), from Niflheim, who is meant to marry Noctis as part of the peace agreement. Of course, Noctis isn’t here, so she does other things in the movie. Anyways, war, fighting, death, more death, and politics. Featuring the voice work also of Liam Mulvey, Andrea Tivadar, Greg Blackford, Edward Saxby, and Adrian Bouchet.

It was surprisingly hard to find good fight scene pictures, so here is a boring one of the princess sitting down.

After playing the special FFXV demo, I sort of lost interest in playing the game. It wasn’t fun, it was weird, and it didn’t feel like Final Fantasy. With Kingsglaive, we get a movie set in a beautiful, but extremely unappealing world. The mix of fantasy and technology in here is dreadfully boring and unoriginal. It feels like just a futuristic society that anyone can think of, with like, 5% fantasy elements. It is extraordinarily unimaginative and it lacks excitement. Add in the extremely realistic modern day cars and one wonders what the hell were these world designers thinking.

The CGI is wonderful, sure. The motion capture was well done. The action scenes were a delight to see, very entertaining, and for some reason the images they released to highlight the film are mostly just close ups of characters.

This film is extremely WEAK in plot. First you have to be able to figure out what the hell is going on. With such elaborate character names, similar looking characters, and a lot of backstory thrown at you in the intro, it is easy to get lost and stay lost. Reading the plot outlines on wikipedia and a final fantasy pedia after the fact still really didn’t do me a lot of help.

The creators of course say that this movie can be enjoyed without the game and vice versa, but holy shit, I really have no idea what I watched. For the average movie goer, they will be scratching their head in confusion throughout. Sure, it looks well made, but it is unintelligible. Sure, the CGI is great, but the world isn’t even pretty or full of magic and wonder.

SquareEnix still has no idea what they are doing. Their games get less and less fantasy and this movie is a colossal waste of time. I mean, unless I have played the game, then it might seem better.

For some reason, Happy Madison is developing a bad rep. Adam Sandler‘s production company has been around for awhile and has brought in such classics like, Jack and Jill and Grown Ups 2! Hell, just this year we already got Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 and Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser.

With such a rich pedigree, how does a company like that get hated on? Hell if I know.

And then there was Pixels, their third film of this year, and one I thought would be completely animated given the posters. Whoops. I obviously figured it out before I watched it, but damn, I don’t think I have ever been fooled like that before. Sure, it could be loosely based off of a Futurama episode, but that was a cartoon, so everything is fair game.

Unless they wanted a giant Mickey Mouse here, then they’d have been fucked.

Brenner (Sandler) was a big deal, in 1982. He was the master of the local arcade, able to see the patterns in the games, creating high score after high score. Hell, he entered into the national arcade tournament and made it all the way to the finals. He lost though to Eddie (Peter Dinklage), a cocky son of a bitch though, because Donkey Kong has some real random elements to it, so he can’t quite figure it out. Oh well, it didn’t ruin his life.

After all, 33 years later, he is working for what constitutes a Geek Squad like company, installing technology in rich big houses. Oh hey, and his best friend, Cooper (Kevin James) ended up as president (married to Jane Krakowski too). But he is seen as a buffoon. Who gives a shit though, because Aliens are about to attack!

Oh yeah, there was a third friend, Ludlow (Josh Gad), who was pretty good at games too, but became a conspiracy nut. And looks like he was write about aliens at least!

The strange thing about these aliens is they are attacking using what looks like arcade games from the early days. You see, after the tournament, they sent digital copies of the games and a lot of pop culture items into a time capsule into space. And alien race took the games as a challenge and built giant replicas of these games to attack the Earth. Each side will only have “three lives” so the first to “win” 3 of these attacks, wins overall. If Earth wins, they leave, if Earth loses, everyone dies. You know where this is going: losers from the 1980’s have to save the day!

Also starring Michelle Monaghan, Matt Lintz, Sean Bean, and Brian Cox.

I’ve had a nightmare like this before. I was playing a real life centipede, but I had no ammo.
Basically insects just fell on me from the sky.

Maybe its the nostalgia, maybe the cool effects, or maybe Dinklage giving his impression of the guy from King of Kong, but Pixels wasn’t super terrible. I know everyone around me said it was bad and they hated it, but I also know they went in ready to rage on it.

Pixels definitely had its moments, but the best parts were the clever ways they “fought” the various levels that totaled the many cities around the world. Having Pac-Man terrorize NYC as they chased him with cars? Come on, that’s clever.

There are unfortunately some lamer elements to the film. Having a cheating subplot? Waste of time, and ruined some of the fun. Q*bert? Fuck Q*bert. That mostly felt like an annoyance more than anything. Creepy suggestion that a woman can be a trophy? Well, you know.

But overall for the most part, Pixels was entertaining. It could have had more fun real life battles instead of an all out attack at the end to cameo in games. If we got even more in depth levels, it would have been great. It was like an advanced Nick Arcade. Just one that probably should have gone for the PG-13 rating, since it probably didn’t deserve PG at all with some of the jokes and language thrown in.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

Everyone knows that James Cameron really loves the ocean. He is stupid rich and just wants to conquer it.

In some ways, I am starting to think that Matt Damon is like a James Cameron-lite. He doesn’t like water, but he is starting to love the shit out of outer space. Three films in three years have featured a Mr. Damon spending time away from Earth. First in Elysium, he went from the slums to the orbit. But you know, he was just there for a little bit. In Interstellar, he was in space for a long..long time. And he was alone!

Think of it like a Three Bears situation. In Elysium he was in space for a small amount of time, in Interstellar it was too long. But maybe in The Martian, Damon will find his “just right” amount of space time. You know, then he can go back to Earth and start doing political things again. Or Boston things. Or maybe, just maybe, fingers crossed, he can go back to voicing Bill the Krill.

Damon had a lot of time alone to reflect on his career while pretending to be on Mars.

Set somewhere in the future, NASA has successfully put people on Mars! Yay! We rock! Speaking of Rocks, there are a lot of them on Mars. And sometimes there are dangerous rock storms. When a particularly powerful storm begins to develop, Commander Lewis (Jessica Chastain) decides that they need to evacuate the planet. There is a chance their escape rocket could tip over and then they’d be stranded! During the storm though, Matt Watney (Damon), a space botanist, gets hit by some debris and goes flying. All of their suit flashy devices say that his suit has opened and he has to be dead.

So Lewis and the rest of the crew (Michael Pena, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie) escape Mars to begin their flight home a few weeks ahead of schedule.

But it turns out, against extreme odds, that Matt is actually alive. However, he is now stranded. The mission only was supposed to last about 30 days, and they had made it to 17, so his rations aren’t that plentiful. He has a huge checklist of responsibilities suddenly that are all vital to his survival. He has to figure out how to grow his own food on a desert planet. He has to make sure his equipment doesn’t break, so he doesn’t run out of water or oxygen. He has to figure out a way to communicate with NASA. And of course, he has to figure out how to get himself home. Even though Matt wants to survive, he openly acknowledges his impending doom and realizes that almost everything he does is just prolonging his most likely catastrophic death.

Eventually, obviously, he isn’t 100% alone. Or else it would be an impossibility. Back on Earth, thanks to satellites, they are able to eventually note the differences of the site and realize he must be alive and kicking. This is where I can sneak in all the rest of the actors.

Who is involved in the mission to get him back? Well, of course, the Head of NASA (Jeff Daniels), a different head of NASA type guy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), head of the Mars program (Sean Bean), head…engineer…of the shuttle? (Benedict Wong), an Astrodynamics guy (Donald Glover), head of NASA PR (Kristen Wiig), and Mindy Park (Mackenzie Davis) who controls a satellite. Or something.

This unfortunate scene reminded me too much of Fantastic Four and now I am undergoing PTSD.

Ridley Scott has been not putting his best foot forward recently. Exodus: Gods and Kings and The Counselor were terrible, and Prometheus had a lot of issues. So I have to go into every new movie of his with a bit of a hesitation.

Thankfully, Scott did not disappoint this time and knocked The Martian out of the park.

The absolute best part of the film is its attention to detail and scientific accuracy. I don’t know how hardcore they went into it, but I will be checking Neil Gegrasse Tyson’s twitter to see if the stars on mars were at least accurate. But everything else is so damn sound and smart. I almost stood up in the middle of the movie to chant U-S-A and show off my Science Boner. That is a bit graphic, but the metaphor is necessary to emphasis how sexy it all was. It isn’t dumbed down and they just go full on smart people talk on the viewer.

After the science, we have to talk about the Damon. Damon plays what has to be the greatest Botanist ever on the silver screen. I don’t know how praise worthy that statement actually is. The writers made him smart, charming, witty and a guy with a morbid sense of humor. He tells jokes to logs where he notes everything he is doing, with the caveat that it probably won’t matter since he will most likely die. And he even got to say “Fuck” twice in the film, despite the PG-13 Rating!

Basically everyone in the cast was great in their roles. Even Stan, Mara, and Hennie, the crew members who people don’t care much about. I want to give special shout outs to Glover, who had a small role but was extremely convincing, and Wong, who was an important side character who for some reason didn’t even make the IMDB credit list.

The film is of course also visually wonderful. Mars, the future Houston space center, outer space, all of it is great. I don’t think 3D added much to the film, and it should be a good experience without it. It isn’t as necessary as Gravity.

Despite how much I liked the film, it only has one issue. There is a sort of epilogue after the events, so you can find out what happened to characters. It seemed off to me. It was also a bit sudden of a tone shift. The previous scene I was almost at the point of tears (You don’t get to know if from happiness or sadness, sorry), but they ended it too quickly for all the emotions to rile up in me. And the last few minutes were just…meh.

Oh well, 99% of a film is still pretty damn awesome.

I don’t think I am ready for this Jelly.

When I first heard about Jupiter Ascending, I was a bit worried. It seemed too far out there, with questionable stars, and a questionable plot. But hey, summer blockbuster, whatever.

JUST KIDDING. It got switched from June to July. But in June, it got pushed back to FEBRURARY 2015. Whoa! That is intense. Blockbusters don’t exist in February. Shitty terrible CGI movies exist in February. This one is going to have a lot of CGI! Ahh!

Apparently it was to finish special effects. They were behind schedule. Right. More likely they moved it back for some terrible reason, like, no faith that it would make money and they just wanted to hide it. Not to mention their awkward Sundance story, they have everything working against them.

The real reason they moved it back was to not ruin Redmayne‘s chance at an acting Oscar.

Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) always thought she was going to do something with her life. But now she is a grown woman, still living with her mom and extended family in Chicago, technically illegal aliens from Russia. She scrubs toilets and dreams of the big life.

And then, aliens from not Earth are trying to kill her! Oh shit!

Here’s what you need to know. There is some space royalty out there. And the mother, the main ruler just died so her kids have inherited a lot of the universe. The oldest, Balem (Eddie Redmayne), the middle female, Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), and the youngest, Titus (Douglas Booth). They are humans, they have been alive for thousands of years, and they look young as fuck.

But now Balem has “control” over Earth (and Jupiter, I guess). And he wants Jupiter Jones, specifically, dead. And maybe the rest of the earth. Jupiter has no idea what is going on, just that aliens are real, Caine (Channing Tatum) has weird ears and keeps saving her, and shit’s crazy.

Also featuring Sean Bean, lizard men soldiers, crazy visuals, pew pew pews, bees, and more pew pew pews.

And the coolest (technically still slow) form of transportation sense the hover board.

Jupiter Ascending was weird. And I really can’t tell if that is a good weird or a bad weird.

Easy enough of a solution, let’s get my pros and cons on.

Pros: There is a unique story behind everything. Some of the special effects are really polished and amazing. Sean Bean is in it. Channing Tatum isn’t terrible. Mila Kunis isn’t terrible. The lizard dudes out of no where are pretty well made and bamf. Roller skating/gravity boots. Bureaucracy. And it is definitely more polished than a shitty January/February CGI movie release.

Cons: The entire romance plot feels forced. Some of the special effects are piss poor and terrible. The sound quality in some scenes make a few actors hard to understand (Bean, Redmayne, occasional lizardman). Entire movie feels rushed, like it was actually supposed to be thirty minutes longer. Like some executive said “Fuck this rescue scene. We know they will save em. Let’s just get the plot going!”

And then there is Eddie Redmayne. Every time he was on screen, my head was tilted just trying to get it. Everything about him is just so weird. His character has an awkawrd soft/whisper voice for most of the film, outside of the three or four times he yells completely out of nowhere. Also tons of quick cuts.

Ugh. But also the story was interesting and I cared about what happened.

There are a lot of things wrong with Jupiter Ascending. Acting decisions, editing, cuts, kind of lame ending. But also some really great action scenes, cool visuals, and interesting universe.

Fuck.

For whatever reason, it has been a shocking fact amongst my friends that I have only seen each of the LOTR movies only once. Each one in theaters, so obviously the theatrical version, never the extended. It is already super fucking hard for me to watch a long movie, and the idea of watching all 3 ended ones in a day just scared me. Scared me more than hippos. Which are pretty damn scary, so you know how scary this idea was to me.

But hey, in honor of The Hobbit remake, why not go to the theaters to see all LOTR again, but extended? In a day?

Why not record my thoughts based on minutes into the film too? I mean, what could happen?

For more info on the event itself, the entire day pass was for $25, came with a lanyard, was going to include special introductions from Peter Jackson, and concession discounts! We are talking $1 refills on drinks (normally no refills), refills on popcorn (normally none), cheaper ice cream, and $2 hot dogs (Versus $4 normally!). All we had to do was stay in the theater for 12.5 hours, how hard could it be?

000 (0:00): Time to start this shit! I got my large drink ready to go, no food yet. Too early. I mean, its 11am, but I of course ate breakfast before this! Yeah. I made the unfortunate mistake of sitting in the middle of a row, but hey, if I have to get up to piss, stretch, food out, or just run around like crazy, I only have to pass one person. I am sure it won’t come up to negatively effect me. Hey, why was there no Peter Jackson introduction?

030 (0:30): Holy fuck, half an hour in, and Bilbo is finally gone. That is HALF AN HOUR of this weird nonsensical back story, then a bunch of shoeless hobbits running around, just, well, running. And doing nothing else. Damn it Bilbo, don’t you know this movie is not your time? This is the time for that little kid from The War! And Rudy! And good old Charlie from Lost! And uhh, some other guy who hasn’t one anything famous.

Alright asshole, for being so useless in any other show or movie, you can have a spot on this review.

054 (0:54): Oh man! Dumbledore and Count Dooku are in an epic wizard fight. Allegedly. All I see them doing is waving their staves at each other, close, but no contact, yet bitches be flying. They at least make it look real on the WWE, come on guys. Man up.

074 (1:14): So, this Man from The Road just took on five of those crazy dark wraith things, by himself. By himself! All Frodo did was sit there and get stabbed, like a bitch. It was like his third fall this series already, and he takes forever to stand back up. If that guy can take on five wraiths by himself, just imagine what they could do if the Hobbits actually gave a shit?

092 (1:32): AHHH, WILL TURNER AND COMIC RELIEF HAVE JUST BEEN IN A SCENE. EVERYONE QUICK. PAY ATTENTION!

100 (1:40): Oh, they are making a fellowship, to guide the ring to the lava pit. I get the title now.

103 (1:43): Meme alert! One does not simply play a character if you are Sean Bean. You must experience the entire life and death of that character, or else. Double internet related time, we have motherfucking Figwit in the house.

Once you go Figwit, you can’t go back.

120 (2:00): Come on Dumbledore, open the damn door. Before the tentacle demon happens.

128 (2:08): Meme alert #2. Confused Dumbledore is super confused. So am I, what the fuck is going on?

147 (2:27): So, are all the meme and internet references in this dungeon? Because You shall not pass just happened. I could piece this part of the movie entirely through memes, and it bugs me.

164 (2:44): Alright, they are in this elf forest. I have learned something about this trilogy. Big elf parts are super boring. It is a shame there were no big dwarf parts. But the extended scenes must have just added stuff here, because I am going to die if these elf scenes continue to happen.

205 (3:25): A-ha! First movie done! Bean is dead, they are split up, and Samwise really wants to mount Frodo.

It’s all in his eyes. You can see it.

243 (4:03): The search for sustinance is going terrible wrong. The movie has started 7 minutes ago, we got a longer break than expected because of the no Peter Jackson stuff. The popcorn refill was a lie, there is no ice cream. The $2 hot dogs may have been a lie, because they did not prep for the LOTR break, when of course everyone is getting hot dogs. I bought two myself, and 7 minutes after it starts, after waiting for 35, they tell me I can go in the theater, and they will deliver it. Gee thanks. I only missed the best scene, the Balrog / Dumbledore fight scene!

270 (4:30): Alright, these orcs are horse shit stupid. “Hey, we need more wood.” Old guy – “Okay, chop more trees. Chop them all down!” “Oh okay”. Damn it, don’t be stupid orcs. Obviously just get more wood. Stop throwing that shit in magma too, what a waste!

290 (4:50): HOT DOGS HAVE ARRIVED!

330 (5:30): Whoa whoa whoa, Dumbledore is back but no longer gray. He is white! I think there is a subliminal message in here somewhere. Can’t beat an old crippled guy, but now that he is white, he can win the game? White power! White power! White power!

Wormtongue? Come on Tolkien, why’d you get stupid there?

365 (6:05): There was another long boring part. I almost died. But thankfully, giant words just attacked everybody and I got excited again. Like, I was falling asleep.

415 (6:55): Another long moment of boredom, but seriously. Seriously. Shit is about to go down. The elves have come to the keep to fuck some shit up, so it might be entertaining soon. Maybe.

422 (7:02): Why the fuck is it called The Two Towers? I only saw one tower in this movie…

438 (7:18): OH YEAH. TREES ARE MAD. The Ents or whatever, I love it when they destroy all the shit. It is possibly my favorite scene in the movies.

I wish this was the real life.

507 (8:27): The third movie started. Good news, I saw the beginning. We get to see Gollum‘s transformation, but not enough of the past to ruin the Hobbit for us. So no worries.

517 (8:37): Samwise just gave Frodo some bread. Bitches love bread. Especially special elven bread give to them by Liv Tyler.

543 (9:03): Hey, speaking of Liv Tyler. It is Figwit again! Thanks to the internet, even gets some speaking lines this time. Hell, he even got a part in the Hobbit movies as another elf. Not Figwit, maybe an actual character. You can tell everyone is pretty pumped for that shit!

566 (9:26): What is this bull shit hidden fortress in Mordor? It looks like the Emerald City, if the Emerald City was taken over by the witch and her weird ass army. That is all I could see here. Secret passage way in the back, my ass. Gollum, stop lying to us.

L. Frank Baum would be suing some asses, if he didn’t die almost 100 years ago.

590 (9:50): That Gollum guy just called Samwise fat. Samwise is mad. He so mad, no one calls him fat. It’d be Mr. Fat to Gollum, at least.

609 (10:09): This Aragorn and random blonde chick romance is getting kind of weird. She basically threw herself at him again, asked if she could do anything for him, despite his love of a certain elf. I thought for sure he was about to ask her for a quick BJ.

622 (10:22): Skull avalanche! Skavalanche? Dead army? Yes, yes yes, dead army!

Yeah, definitely Skavalanche. No other term can do!

624 (10:24): So the dead army might have scared me a little bit. I dropped my pen. It is a dark theater, and a black pen. Whoops. But hey, Peter Jackson just got shot by pretty elf boy, which is awesome.

641? (10:41): NOOOO. Why did you do that? “No man can kill me!” “I am not a man!” Oh god, the cheese, it is falling from the sky, in such a climatic battle. At least they won. Too bad the ending is still about an hour away.

665 (11:05): You know what Return of the King reminds me of? Star Wars Episode III. Frodo is looking super Anakin like in that movie, all this magma. I thought I was about to hear samwise yell that he had the upper ground, and to call Gollum foolish. Holy shit, I wonder if they used similar CGI sets?

Is this not a clip from the end of LOTR?

675 (11:15): I think I will let Randall take it from here.

Yeah its over! And only 12 ish hours of my life were gone!

Turns out these movies were much better than I remember. Not sure why everyone hates on the second one. I thought it better than the first, which just takes an eon roughly to get set up.

I finished the day with only five piss breaks, pretty proud of myself. I am just disappointed I got the 15 disk Blu-Ray set of the movies about two weeks before the event, because now I won’t want to see the awesome BR quality until sometime next year. There is a such thing as too many hobbits.

But be warned, if you do this stuff, maybe bring something else to do during the long boring parts. Or at least have a mini-Olympics in between movies, to get the blood flowing again. I am pretty sure there is no way the Hobbit movies will have extended versions. They already extended it from 2 to 3 movies, he can’t possibly have more. Can he? Can he?!

It turns out that Silent Hill and Silent Hill: Revelation are actually connected movies! Shocking I know. But for some reason I just figured they’d be two different stories both set in the same town, based on different games in the series. After all, it has only been a six year difference between the movies.

But nope, Sean Bean plays the same character in both movies, so I had to rush watch the first one to make sure I understood all the complicated plot developments this movie would surely have.

Well, at least this also has snow. Wait no. Ash. Yep, that’s ash.

Well don’t worry, seeing the first film is not necessary. The dad (Bean) and daughter Heather/Shannon (Adelaide Clemens) are moving all across America because the cult in Silent Hill, West Virginia is after her. She doesn’t remember any of the events from the first film, when she was in the town with her mother (Radha Mitchell), and didn’t know that her mom was still trapped inside its city limits.

But when they move to a new town, with new identities, she continues to receive strange dreams that feel extremely real, telling her that she is never to return to Silent Hill.

So when her dad gets kidnapped to protect her location, she does what anyone would do in that situation, and returns to Silent Hill. Thankfully she has the help of Vincent (Kit Harrington) who also happened to be a new kid in school, and for whatever reason doesn’t find any of this weird.

The cult wants to kill her, because they believe she is the innocent part of a demon child Alyssa that is terrorizing their town…that they also created. They are hoping to kill the demon, in order to birth a new demon, who can uh…kill the world? I am not even sure. But Carrie-Anne Moss is in charge of it all, and Malcolm McDowell plays a blind crazy uncle.

This is also how I like my womenz.

I don’t go to 3D movies a lot, right now my count is at six, but I am trying to give them more chances. “Silent Hill: Revelation” is by far has the worst 3D I have ever seen, and I also watched Katy Perry: Part Of Me in 3D. Its 3D consisted entirely of things coming out at you and roughly zero of everything else. It was made purely for a scare factor, but even did poorly at that aspect.

I don’t think you need to see the first “Silent Hill” film to see this one, because they try to explain everything you need in the second movie. However, the plot made absolutely no sense to me, despite seeing both films. I can’t tell the point of the cult, nor could I fully grasp why the town went to hell in the first place.

Most would say that the movie isn’t about plot, but cool visual effects. Well, its visual effects are bad (and they should feel bad), so then the movie just might be about being scared! But even I didn’t find it scary, just predictable and weird. The first film most would agree was a bit dull, trying (and failing) to recreate the alone feelings felt from the game. I think it is obvious that for this film they tried to amp everything up, yet still it just didn’t feel quite right. A bit disappointing that this is the only horror movie to be released on Halloween week. If you are looking for some good scares, I’d recommend basically anything else but this.

As promised, Mirror Mirror review slightly after Snow White And The Huntsman. I had to give myself time to fully digest the plot from my system. Because no one wants to see two similar movies so close together.

Unless you really really love Snow White based content, then I don’t know.

If you are that above person, check this shit out. It’s Snow White. Fuck yeah, right?

In this movie, Snow White’s (Lily Collins) mom died during child birth. Very sad. Her dad (Sean Bean) thought it would be good for her to have a mom, so he found a beautiful woman to call Queen (Julia Roberts). Many years after that, there is rumors of a Beast in the forest, to which the King goes to investigate but never returns! Ten years after that, hey look, Snow is turning 18.

She has been shut inside, the Queen making everyone thinks she is afraid of the outside, in order to make her a bad ruler, while she taxes the kingdom to poorness for rich parties. Boo. Well, the Baker Margaret (Mare Winningham) is Snow’s biggest supporter, and lets her know that shit is going bad and she wants to investigate. Well it sucks. Eventually she wanders the forest where she finds Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer) and his assistant, tied up, attacked by giants! Or at least dwarves dressed up as giants. They go to the castle and thank the girl.

Oh shit she is a Princess, they find out later, and the Prince likes her a lot. Pisses off the Queen, who demands her death, but instead, she escapes to the forest and finds the dwarves. Queen banished them from the kingdom and they are forced to live alone! And they are all midgets. Like Jordan Prentice and Ronald Lee Clark.

They agree to let her join and train her to fight and steal, and increase her wit so they can steal from the queen the taxes and return them to the city! She is even able to fend off an attack from the Prince and a group (partially under spell). Once the Queen uses more magic to have a wedding, the group steal the Prince and attempt to break the spell. But will the beast that lives in the forest come a knocking? Why does the Queen waste her precious magic on turning her assistant (Nathan Lane) into a Cockroach for a bit, instead of like, some torture.

The fact that she gets trained and is more than one fight makes her arguably more of a warrior than the Snow White in that other movie.

Alright, so that the films are a bit different, Mirror Mirror ended up being the “comedy one” instead of the “Serious one” (which there has been numerous of both in the past). If I judged the latter poorly on being a bad serious movie, then I would have to judge this based on its comedic value. Well, not much was too funny. I thought Julia Roberts was pretty bad in this movie as a Queen. Charlize Theron blows her out of the water (“Just review this movie, damn it! Stop comparing!” – Reader. “Fine” – Me”).

But I felt this was an overall more complete feeling movie, with a bit better plot. Cheesy as all heck, but everyone likes Cheese. The visuals were vivid as shit, because this is done by the same guy who gave us the Immortals, which focused more on visuals than a decent and coherent story. (Alright alright, no more other movie talk). The ending also, out of no where, featured a weird Bollywood number, which I enjoyed, but uh, the lyrics/singing weren’t good.

I think overall the beginning was a bit too slow, but it picked up once Snow White was “killed” and left the castle. Dwarves were sweet, Prince was amusing, and Snow White was more bad ass in this film than the other (Hah! Still did it anyways. Neener neener). But still weak in other parts. Oh well.

One of the central plots in The Invention of Lying was that the main guy was a writer/actor whatever, and in their world, all they did was read about the past for their movie. He got assigned the shitty years apparently, and the only event he had to work with really was the Black Plague. As they constantly joked in that movie, you can’t make a good movie about the Black Death!

When I heard that I called BS. Who wouldn’t want a nice movie about the Black Death? Shit was crazy! Disease, dead people, more diseases, populations wiped out. No real war I guess…probably some accusations of black magic. Maybe that is it. But you know?

Looks like SOMETHING is about to happen.

So obviously this movie is about disease. And one village that is getting destroyed by it hears rumors of another village that has not been plagued. Sean Bean, all knightly, wants to go investigate. He gets a group of people, including the priest monk dude Eddie Redmayne.

The journey takes awhile and then eventually they find the village! Lead by a woman, Carice van Houten, who might be a necromancer? What? She has apparently brought someone back to life. Oh shit, they aren’t Christians!

And yeah. The plot is basically that. They try to figure out if the woman really has powers, are trying to find out why the village has had no plague, and you know, not get killed in the process. But that plan also goes poorly. People get locked up, and maybe sacrificed.

The movie had a lot more pretty brutal violence than I was expecting, almost reminded me of Saw levels, just in action movie form not horror. So that torture porn stuff might be relevant.

She’s a witch! Burn her!

And yeah. I think I know what the movie was overall going for. Closer to the end the themes were a bit better to pick up on, and what might have been occurring with the main characters. BUT. It just took way too long to get to that point. By then I could barely find myself interested in the movie. I was actually turned off by the amount of violence in this movie, if you can believe that. So it wasn’t really the type of experience I was hoping for a Black Plague movie. But then again, not sure what kind of experience I’d expect.