Shadow Covenant

So, this week “Iron Man 3” premieres:

The previous ones were terribly entertaining movies, so looking forward to this one (although I don’t know about the “dark and gritty” approach they seem to have chosen for it)…

This reminded me of another two movies I’m excited about:

I’m not a huge fan of Superman, to be honest… he’s “too good” and “too powerful” for my taste…

Anyway, this one Snyder/Nolan treatment might be exactly what’s needed to get me on the Superman bandwagon!

I’m a Star Trek fan (although I’m more of a Stargate/Star Wars guy), and the last movie by Abrams was very good, so I’m looking forward to this one…

As I tend to look at everything around me in terms of games, watching the trailer for this one has got me thinking… In most space games, “shields” are kings… All ships have shields and when those are down, they’re 10 seconds away from annihilation… but I really enjoy slug-fests, in which slower, mass-based weapons are used to pummel the hull of a ship, so that when the shields are down, that’s not the end of the world…

This prompted a discussion with my friends about the lack of “visceral” space combat… combat by nature is something that appeals to our primeval nature, the visceral side of us… yet, space combat is usually treated as something not-visceral, which is interesting… but, if I think on it, Battlestar Galactica has some of the best space-fight sequences ever, and it’s pretty visceral, because it’s not all about laser and shields, but about ships getting beaten up and after a lot of punishment they finally explode (it also has something to do with the tribal soundtrack and the shake-cam, I’d say, but it all just adds to my point that fights should be visceral, even space ones)… I’d like a space game I designed to have that feeling, to be honest, it really makes it feel more “real”, in my opinion…

Watched “The King’s Speech” last weekend, and I thought it was a brilliant watch… The mix between drama and humor really pulled me into what I half-expected to be a boring movie. The actors were a great choice, with loads of chemistry between Firth and Rush, which above all (and more important for this story) was believable…

The movie’s story is about George VI (the father of the current Queen of England, for all of those that know squat about monarchies and stuff) and his fight against his stutter… As a member of the Royal Family, he was expected to deliver speeches, and he couldn’t because of his huge speech impediment. Geoffrey Rush plays a specialist in speech defects that helps him overcome (or mitigate, more precisely) his problem… A great story about friendship and fear… Really worthwhile… 10/10

Also watched this one… Sometimes is good to stop and see a mindless action movie with no intellectual depth… Unfortunately, this wasn’t it. Although it lacks any kind of intellectual depth, the action scenes were disappointing, to say the least…

This is the standard story of revenge… Guy needs to get revenge on the people that killed his brother, by killing them… Usually I don’t have anything about this kind of narratives, but this one is a yawn-fest… The main character (played by “The Rock”) is 2-dimensional (albeit intense, I’ll give him that), the bad guys are a bunch of wieners and the whole movie just feels sluggish. Don’t waste your time on this one… 4/10

Watched “Jonah Hex” the other day… It’s at best a “popcorn-movie”, by which I mean that you see it and then you forget it…

It keeps you entertained for a while, but doesn’t add anything of value to the genre.

“Jonah Hex” is a movie based on a DC comic. It takes place in a Western setting, and follows the story of Jonah Hex, a man with a dark past that almost died, but somehow survived, and gained the ability to talk with the dead… during the movie, he has to foil a plan to overthrow the newly-borned US government. While the premise is fine, but to be honest it doesn’t hold up the movie.

I never read the comics, so I can’t speak on how well/badly the movie reflects it, but the movie itself seems to be just a bunch of action sequences cobbled up together with some cheesy storyline. The action itself is well done, dynamic, all that you’d expect from Hollywood. The filler sequences are also what you’d expect in a Hollywood movie, thin threads to keep the audience entertained until the next action sequence (or to show off the mediocre Megan Fox… don’t get me wrong, she’s gorgeous, but a terrible actress).

The basic problem of the movie is that the “gimmick” (talking to the dead) really doesn’t shine in it, and after failing at that, the movie transforms into a “Wild Wild West”-kind of movie…

Bottom-line, the movie is entertaining, the visual style is interesting, but the story is paper-thin and the character doesn’t stand out as it should (and as I guess it does in the comics)… I’m giving it a 7/10.

Watched “The Box” this weekend (among other stuff, I’ll post about it later this week).

It’s an interesting movie; it’s based on a 1970’s short story called “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, and was adapted to an episode of “Twilight Zone” in the 80’s… my final idea about the movie is that the story is much more suited to a format like “The Twilight Zone” than an actual full-lenght feature-film…

Although the movie doesn’t become “boring” per-se, it has lots of dead moments where not revelations are comming and that seems to be just re-hashing what has already gone on…

The acting is good enough, with Frank Langella being awesome as Steward (he’s super-creepy, as the character calls for it); the special effects are not cutting edge, but they do their job (some of the work in the scar on Langella’s face looks too CGI, but other than that, it’s ok).

The story revolves around a couple to which a mysterious man gives a box with a button. If they press that button, one person they don’t know will die, and they’ll get one million dollars. The movie than proceeds into analysis of human behavior and the consequences of actions.

On a final note, the movie is quite nice (a bit slow for some)… I give it a 7/10.

Later this week, don’t miss the review on “Jonah Hex”, and the introduction of new featured articles in everyone’s favorite format: lists!

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Now for the spoiler part (stop reading if you want to check out the movie):

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Really, stop reading… I’m telling you, it kind of makes the movie more boring if you know this…

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You’re really persistent, aren’t you?

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Fine, fine, have it your way…

This is all supposed to be a big test by a super-advanced race of alien beings, trying to figure out if mankind can be selfless or not. If not, they’ll destroy us all, like they did on Mars millions of years ago…

The silly part, in my opinion is the nature of the test: people seem to press the button just because they don’t actually believe in the “bad” consequence, they just don’t want to miss out on the “good” consequence, and that seems to me that it’s not a good metric of human behavior… Specially, it seems too falible to be used by a super-alien race…

And I’m back… This post: movie reviews…

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen some movies, and I’d like to share some thoughts about them with you guys…

“Taken”: A ex-secret agent gets his daughter kidnapped in France and he wants to get her back… Good visuals, good acting (Liam Neeson is awesome), an interesting story (Luc Besson). The action scenes are great and the view to the sexual trafic business is scary… A suprisingly good movie. 8/10

“Planet 51”: Another very good surprise. It’s an CGI animation movie, and while it’s not “Pixar-quality” level, it’s very good (specially looking at the progress from these guys last movies… the evolution is astonishing). What makes the movie really stand out is the humor and the story… the base line is the arrival of a human to an “alien” world that seems stuck in the 1950’s, with all the mentality of the time (space invasion!!!). Some of the characters are wicked fun, specially “Rover”, the rover-like robot that was sent to the planet before the human arrived. 9/10

“Drag Me To Hell”: A horror movie with a neat story… as all horror stories, you never know how it’s going to end, and this is no exception… It’s not groundbreaking (using the same plot outline as hundreds of horror movies before), but it’s a good one to see late in the evening. 7/10

“Book of Eli”: This movie was utterly amazing… the visuals are awesome (in a post-apocaliptic fashion), the fight sequences are extremely cool (they remind me of the movie “Equilibrium”), and the story is well told and interesting… I wasn’t expecting a very good movie (since lots of friends of mine didn’t enjoy it), but I was completely blown away by it… seriously, it ended and I was staring at the end-credits saying “Fuck… me…”. Really, really, really good… 10/10

“Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time”: Well, this is a very complicated movie for me to say something about… I was a huge fan of the games, so the movie kind of fell short for me… My friends all loved it, but I can’t avoid the feeling that the film was lots of waste potential. So, some notes:

• Jake Gyllenhaal does a good job as Prince, but the character portraied in the movie isn’t the character from the game… this Prince is a good-hearted rogue, while the Prince in the games is an egomaniac, selfish prick… Guess that wasn’t Disney-enough…
• The whole plotline is actually pretty good and solid, considering the source material (not that it is bad, but it’s as “gamey” as a story can be, which wouldn’t translate that well to movie, in my opinion). But it’s terribly predictable and just a repetition of its self… Come on, he keeps getting the Dagger stolen from him and stealing it back… he does that about 4 times during the movie!
• The Dagger of Time effect was awesome, but badly used… he didn’t use the dagger enough, and he never used it in combat, which would have looked positively kick-ass…
• For an “entertainment” movie, it’s quite boring in some parts… I was expecting an action-fest all the time, but the movie proceeds in an erratic pace, with the action scenes taking too little of the screen-time (considering that the movie doesn’t have much more to held himself up… the banther between characters is just passable).

So, basically, just loads of wasted potential, in my opinion, which is too bad, since I was really looking forward to this… 6/10

So that’s it for my reviews… 🙂 As usual, comment at will, give me your thoughts and ideas and let’s get some arguments going! 🙂

Finally I got a chance watch “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”… After the reviews I’ve saw about the movie, I had low expectations for this, so I was quite surprised to have so much fun with it…
Again, it’s the usual Terry Gilliam mixture of insanity, good storytelling, and above all, leaving stuff to the imagination of the viewer…
The film is as good for what it shows, as it is about what it implies… most of the tale of the Doctor himself is hidden and implied, and as such, we can build his entire story in our minds, which for an imaginative person is very cool…
The reviews were a tad cruel to this one (I wonder what exactly were they expecting, to be honest), but for me, the movie hit the mark, with superb acting (even the workaround with Johnny Depp, Collin Farrel and Jude Law to offset Heath Ledger’s death), and more importantly, a non-conventional story, which seems to go in the direction of the “love-conquers-all” persuasion, but takes a U-Turn and goes to some very dark and unexpected paths…

All in all, I liked it very much and strongly recommend it to everyone…

To finish up this post, just a nify link: http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html … This is for programming geeks like myself, but it’s a good laugh for those… 🙂