Category: Uncategorized

Whew! Thats a long title. So from now on, it will be PJOTLT. Just rolls right off the tongue. This movie is I guess based off of some book series as well. Not to mention greek mythology (no way!). When I saw this preview a year and a half ago, I thought it was a joke. What is this crap? Well, after viewing it….I liked it. It was a very interesting movie.

A friend of mine says compared to the source is no where close. Oh well, fuck the source material. I only care if it is super wrong, and I was just told it left parts out. Movies aren’t books.

Picture taken just after some people read the previous lines.

A lot happens in the movie, and its very close to two hours in length. The visuals are pretty, and there is a lot of action. Are there things I’d like to change? Heck yeah. Afterall, I am a damn ancient history major as well as a geologist. I know me some greek mythos (as it is real history).

I don’t like how they like to show the Underworld/Hades as Hell/Satan. That bugged me, in terms just Americanizing greek mythos. Some may say that me not caring that these movies being different from the books, but caring that it doesn’t fit in with greek mythology is hypocritical. I say it is wayyy different. It’d be like calling a person a Christian in a movie, and noting that they plan on going to Las Vegas once they die. Just different stuff.

Seeing Brandon T. Jackson as a Satyr was cool. Pierce Brosnan as a centaur was awesome. Logan Lerman was also in 3:10 to Yuma (the new one, obviously), and carried the movie well as the lead Percy Jackson. A lot of cheesiness was in this movie, but it is to be expected with its rating. Having the story be about the son of Poseidon, and not Zeus, was a refreshing change.

I couldn’t find a good picture, but you can kinda see his crazy legs.

All I am saying is I might be watching the next one of these in theaters. If someone had told me it had Brandon T. Jackson as a Satyr, I would have seen this movie immediately. So there you go.

I didn’t realize (despite the title) that this movie was also very spanish like. It was kind of vague about actually where the main girls are from, but they are Latina in nature. The story is actually based on the movie Sense and Sensibilitly (yes it was a book first, leave me alone, I didn’t read the book). I didn’t know it would actually try to have a famous plot to it, I just saw it as a cheesy romantic comedy that could have probably been a made for tv movie. True story, it used to be called Sense and Sensibilidad. Yuck!

The movies main stars are Camilla Belle and Alexa Vega. Wait, Alexa Vega? From Spy Kids? Well. She got hotter.

Also starring… Fez From That 70’s Show?

Vega, in dress. Fez, looking like Enrique. Damn Fez.

Despite having Fez, which makes it kick ass, it did still just feel like a made for TV movie. The other main male lead was the older debater from Rocket Science. Fez played the role of Alan Rickman in this movie (again joke. He played the same “character” Alan Rickman played.) and it probably won’t ever happen again, until we get a reboot of Die Hard.

Fez as Hans Gruber? I can see it.

At the funeral of their dad, it all seemed like a joke to me. No one seemed to look that sad, like the realized this was a lame movie and that they shouldn’t even try.

Now clearly I am not the market group this movie was trying to capture with this movie. As a white guy, something about the title For Colored Girls does not appeal to me. But as a movie watcher, all movies appeal to me. So I had to see this movie now. Maybe it contained secrets that I wasn’t supposed to know? Like reading letters addressed to to other people. I definitely don’t do that, because that is a crime. Crime is illegal.

And I don’t do illegal things, but I do legal things with items used to stop illegal things.

I was SHOCKED and Taken Aback from this film. I don’t think those are mutually exclusive terms. This movie could be viewed as a series of unfortunate events to happen to seven different black women. From underground abortions, to rape, to child death, the negative happenings just continued to pound away at the viewer, leaving the second half of the film to mostly be a recovery phase, to try and recollect. Seriously. It sucked. You will feel horrible at the midpoint, and then a little bit worse right after that. Each women (who have real names but also represent a color of the rainbow) also gets a long monologue that seems really out of place in the movie. It is in poetic form and it is because the movies are based off of a series of poems, called…wait for it…

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

Rainnnnbowwwwwwww

Overall, most of the actresses did very well, and the three~ mainish man characters. Unfortunately, with all of the characters and story lines it is easy to forget what is happening to who. Similarly the out of place feel of the monologues push it from a 4 to a 3.

I originally listed this movie as 30 Seconds or Less. Whoops. Minutes are larger than seconds, by at least a factor of 60. Math!

The start of Skynet was actually learning how to make calculators speak.

So we have the good guys. Mark Zuckerberg and Todd Haverford.

And the bad guys. Kenny Fucking Powers and Bucky Larson. Ugh. Sorry. Nick Swardson is better known as Nick Swardson. He doesn’t have many memorial roles. Instead you think of him as that guy in blah and blah.

Jesse is just a down on his luck no prospects pizza delivery boy. For some reason, his restaurant also has the 30 minutes or less guarantee, which as everyone knows is silly. No real basis for who’s clock is actually right, just leads to a whole bunch of problems. Especially since they apparently don’t start the timer until the pizza is given to the driver and on the way, not when the call is made. How are these customers going to be all “oh man, 2 minutes late”. Unless they magically know when he left. Err, nevermind.

So yeah, he is a slacker, but a good guy and smart. Danny McBride is living off of his dad (a war vet’s) wealth, and mad that his dad keeps buying shit with his lotto earnings. He figures at this rate, by the time he dies, there will be no money left. So why not have his dad killed? But they gotta play it smart, cant just have them be the killer. So they find a guy who will do the job, but first they need $100,000.

Using that same logic, they think they should find someone else to steal the money for them too. So they agree to kidnap a complete stranger, strap a bomb to his chest, and give him 24 hours to rob a bank. CRIMINAL. MASTERMINDS.

This was a pretty funny movie. Aziz may have been the funniest part of the movie. But that is because he is secretly one of the funniest people in television. It is his high pitched voice when he is yelling that does it.

Danny McBride acted how he generally acts in all movies. Swardson was dumb sidekick. Jesse E is in more serious things than he is in comedies. He was a funny character as well, but more importantly, when he had a bomb stuck to his chest and he was panicking, I believed the fear he displayed. That alone is almost worth the watch itself. It is hard to play believably scared, especially in a comedy, but he does it well.

Pictured: Serious shit.

So yeah. Good movie. Why aren’t you watching it yet?

I was afraid this movie would be way too religious, and, well, it was. Yep. Sympathy for Delicious is a gross title too. No one is actually sure what it means.

Dude gets faith/touch healing ability, sometime after he becomes paralyzed from the waist down. He was just an underground DJ! But now he is crippled. A crippled underground DJ who can heal people played by the writer, Christopher Thornton. Ruffalo (in his first Director role while looking way too much like John Leguizamo in my opinion) tries to get him to use his power to help people. Cause he is a priest.

John Leguizamo could never play a priest, however.

Unfortunately Crippy feels like he is being exploited and feels like he should be getting paid more. So instead he tours with a band, using his power to become all famous and shit. Until he is blamed for a death (as he tried to heal instead of getting help for) and put in prison. Life is shit. Until he does a selfless good thing, then life is good again. Still paralyzed but good life.

Damn this movie. It was pretty overall lame. BUT. I do think the acting by Thornton and Ruffalo was good, culminating to their argument before the trial. Also overall has a gritty indie feel to it. As I always say, acting alone cannot make the film good though. Especially if it really just the one scene. Orlando Bloom is in this movie too, but not important, just the band leader.

I ran out of Ruffalo hulk images. So priest Ruffalo will have to do.

1 out of 4.

Ehhhhh.

Oh. Want more? Ehhhhhhhh.

The picture below is how I felt watching and after watching Blitz.

I am not above using cats on this website.

Blitz starred Jason Statham, and I was super bored. This film could not keep my interest. It was all,

“blahblahbritish talk, blah blah, someone is killing police. But I’m a bad ass cop! I will find him.”
“After how many more police die?”
“I don’t know know, as long as my woman and I are safe. I will find him before he finds me.”

Yep. That is how the whole movie felt. Jason Stathom is only good at action. Afterall, he is pretty much just acting as ridiculous as his real life used to be. This is not even a psychological thriller or anything.

The killer isn’t smart, he just covers up the basic elements. He doesn’t leave clues for them to find him, he just does it. The action is super limited in the movie as well. The biggest action scenes were the beginning and the end of the film. In between that action crust is a lot of bored tofu.

Only reason people do this is because they see Stathom and assume action.

There comes a moment in every mans life where he realizes he is now criminally insane. Mel Gibson had one of these moments.

Mel Gibson’s moment is pictured above.

Oh wait sorry, that is actually a movie. He is acting about having a nervous breakdown. My bad!

The Beaver is a movie I definitely had false pretenses about. Didn’t know what to expect, thought it would be something silly about a family and a talking beaver that joins their lives. Nope. It is about a depressed man, who leaves his family, and ends up using a beaver puppet to communicate with the world. Communication was something quite hard for him, bad for the CEO of a giant toy company. Thankfully there is, The Beaver.

But yeah. This movie is also about depression. And depression is srs bzns. I didn’t know it was directed by Jodie Foster (who also played the wife). This is the only big directing project she has done according to IMDB, with the other three things being pre 1996.

The Beaver also helps with sexy time.

The Beaver is actually a very intelligent movie, of a depressed man trying to deal with his problems. Even if he thinks he is getting better, the people closest to him can see he is only getting worse. This film is more than about Gibson being depressed, but equally about his family in coping with Gibson, and how his son is seemingly going down the same path. I was shocked at how good this movie actually was. I will probably buy it (okay just did).

The box for this movie is pretty cool. Jackie Chan, some other asian guy, and Little Big Solider. What is this about? What does it MEAN?

It means awesome good shit.

Well I will tell you.

First I think this was a pet project movie for Jackie Chan for some time. It is definitely a Chinese movie, as guess what, it is subtitled. I personally watched it Dubbed, because I don’t care. (I am not sure if Jackie Chan did his own dubbing). The story is one of the many Ancient China stories that are abundant in the world, and of which I know nothing about. This takes place in BC China, when there is warlords, fighting, big clans, armies, and more. Such a small story too in the large history, as the Writer, he clearly made this movie for him.

He plays a farmer who was enlisted to join his warlord clans army. Accidentally in his first fight he ends up capturing the opposing sides General. If a general is brought back (normally dead) to the warlord, the soldier is granted amnesty from the war, is given a large plot of land, and left alone if they want forever. All Jackie Chan wants to do is farm. Raise a family. The other main actor who plays the general also does very well. The fight scenes that featured them two were fantastically made. As you are aware, a lot of Asian martial arts movies nowadays have these artsy and stylistic fight scenes. The way they use the surroundings. The barn fight and “stick fight” were some of my favorites.

The ending I didn’t see coming, (but all my friends who know their Feudal Chinese history probably do! Yes, all zero of you) and thought it sad. Oh well. Can’t change the past.*

The movie was also beautiful on Blu-Ray. I assume there was very little used in CGI, and that the areas where filming took place just look that awesome. It is hard to imagine China as a beautiful place, mostly because I am brainwashed to assume it is just communism and other bad things. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Not the best part of Asia, as this took place in San Francisco. It is, however, the best part of San Francisco.

4 out of 4.

* – Allegedly

I was told I needed to watch this movie when I revealed Source Code. Same director, and he did Moon before Source Code. Had a LOT less budget, many less actors, and was independently released.

“Independently released? Well I approve!”

This was a great sci-fi movie. Thankfully, by reading the back cover, you really have no idea what the movie is about. For the sake of everything, don’t try and figure out what it is about before watching it. Don’t watch the trailer. Here is a synopsis that will not ruin it for you:

Moon: Sam Rockwell is on the moon alone. He is there to harvest moon stuff, and send it back to earth, as a new and awesome energy source. He has a robot companion (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Then some weird shit happens.

There ya go! So once the “Weird shit” starts to happen, I continued to make guesses “Oh the ending will be blahdyblahblah” and then 10 minutes later, said guess happens. This just leaves me dumbfounded. Why would that happen so soon? “Oh!” I says to myself. “Well. Maybe this is going to be lead to this?”.

I think I did that like, three times. Until I was wrong and got an overall ending sequence I wasn’t guessing. Hooray for not knowing what will happen! The simplisticness of the movie makes it work, with only really two main characters. Sam Rockwell with a beard is cool, but I kept finding it odd his characters name was Sam Bell. What is he, trying to turn into Bill Paxton now? Either way, this does what a good sci-fi movie should do. Question humanity. And other philosophical things. (The other acceptable good sci-fi movie is of course the one that is secretly political).

Whoa whoa. Only Bill Paxton can be Bill Paxton. If you aren’t Bill Paxton, you can’t be Bill Paxton. And I am Bill Paxton. Bill Paxton.

3 out of 4.

Barney’s Version is a movie I had never heard of, but apparently it was nominated for an Academy Award AND starred Paul Giamatti? At the same time?

This is my subtle way of implying Hell has frozen over.

Of course after watching, I saw that it was actually only nominated for Best Makeup. Whoops. It lost to The Wolfman.

That is a shitty category anyways. The fact that Curious Case of Benjamin Button beat out Hellboy II is a sham! (Yes, I have opinions on who should win Best Makeup).

Regardless, this was a pretty good movie. Calling a comedy, I don’t agree with. Paul makes a bunch of jokes, and some situations occur, but overall I thought of it as a drama. Especially when you realized WHY this movie is called Barney’s Version, and what is actually going on.

The ending was pretty sad. I had some tears. It is a story of a man who falls in love with three women throughout his life. It also explores the relationship with his best friend, also leading to some very interesting moments. The story is told out of order, but that also has a reason.

And it not just because of alcohol.

The movie is actually based off of a book. I don’t know of anyone who has read the book. So it probably sucks. The best part of this movie is that it takes place in Canada, which means, you guessed it, there are hockey related scenes in it. He is from Montreal in the movie, and in one great scene, he is rushing into the streets to catch a woman before she hops on a train….and traffic is backed up because the Habs have won a playoff game. Good stuff.

Clearly any movie with a hockey scene is a good movie too. Good, not as well known, pick up.