Sword of Doom is an old black and white samurai movie from Japan. A swordsman shows up on a mountainside and kills and old man praying at a shrine to Buddha. The swordsman is supposed to fight another guy in the town the following day and a woman shows up to try to talk him out of it. He asks her if it’s worth her giving up the goods to stop the fight. If the girl’s husband (as it turns out) loses, then he loses the right to teach at the school he’s in charge of – and it sounds like this is very likely.
They fight the next day in front of the town at some sort of competition. He kills the husband who has just divorced his wife when he found out she was sneaking away to sleep with the bad guy. She wants to run away with the bad guy and he casts her aside before he’s ambushed by the townspeople loyal to the now-deceased husband. The ex-wife ends up with the bad guy and they have a kid together. Oddly enough, they both appear to hate each other.
Bad guy’s father is on his deathbed and tells the husband’s brother to kill his son (that killed the husband). The brother tracks down the bad guy in Kyoto, but the bad guy is going a bit crazy and starts killing all kinds of people he’s with. He does sustain some injuries however. Then randomly, there’s a pillow-throwing scene to distract the weakened samurai – I had no idea their weakness was pillows.
Then the movie just ends. I’m assuming he dies, but seriously, he’s midway through killing everyone in the building and the credits roll. Weird ending. I’m not sure how much of this movie actually made sense in a linear plot sort of way. It’s not disjunct or anything, it’s just pointless and doesn’t end. I’d not recommend this film to people who like movies with a plot.
Friday, May 28, 2010
MacGruber
Here is what I knew about MacGruber before going to see this film: MacGruber is a character from an SNL skit (I haven’t seen SNL in more than 15 years) and MacGruber is a spoof of MacGyver (I haven’t seen MacGyver in more than 15 years). I wasn’t familiar with the skit and I hadn’t even seen a preview, I’d only heard people say “it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.” Where I come from, that’s usually means I should see this film.
[Side note here: I wondered if my theater ran some sort of special night for whores on Thursdays, but it turns out it was just the opening night for Sex in the City. I still don’t understand why ladies would tramp themselves up for this premier – it’s a safe bet any guy in the theater in line for SITC isn’t going to be interested in a female in the first place, right? Just sayin…]
MacGruber’s wife has been killed at the altar by Dieter Von Kunth (and yes, they say his last name as many times as humanly possible in this film). Kunth is played by who I initially thought, “Wow, Brad Pitt has really let himself go.” Sadly, Kunth is actually played by Val Kilmer, who has also let himself go – but I’ll be honest, is still a good looking guy that makes me miss Willow. Kunth is now an arms dealer and has gotten his hands on a nuclear missile and plans to blow up Washington DC. The US military has asked MacGruber, the world’s top special ops killer, to take down Kunth and get his final revenge.
MacGruber resists at first, but eventually caves and assembles a team of top thugs and then proceeds to accidentally blow them all up. The brass try to pull him off the case but MacGruber sets up another team, including Ryan Phillippe and Kristen Wiig, to go after Kunth. MacGruber isn’t the awesome fighter/mastermind people assume him to be, but he’s got a pretty high opinion of himself, which is hilarious/pathetic at times.
Then… there are the love-making scenes. I’m convinced they were written by the writers of Family Guy, since they went on just long enough to make you uncomfortable and then annoyed, and then it comes around back to being funny again and finally stops. MacGruber has sex with Wiig and then out of guilt goes back to his dead wife’s grave and then has sex with his dead wife’s ghost. It’s ridiculous, but again, somehow ends up being enough to get a laugh.
The funny part for me is that MacGruber doesn’t use guns (but only because he doesn’t know how). He does the MacGyver thing and makes things out of bubblegum and tennis balls that never work, and he also has his patented move – the throat rip. He grabs bad guys’ throats and then rips out their windpipe. It’s hilariously gruesome and I love it.
The movie is filled with all kinds of slapstick prop humor (like shoving celery up their asses) and dressing Wiig up like MacGruber in one scene (where she flips out in a coffee shop and it actually IS funny) and then dresses her (poorly) as one of the criminals. At one point, he ends up using Phillippe as a human shield for a long period of time and somehow it is much funnier than you’d expect. But the film is also filled with occasional brilliant writing. The acting is supposed to make you uncomfortable and isn’t supposed to be good. Plus, Chris Jericho (whom I used to be mistaken for when he had hair) is in the film, so you know it’s quality casting, right? It helps that there are a handful of other wrestlers in the film – no wait, it doesn’t help.
So, despite it being a 90-minute SNL skit, it still ended up getting more laughs than I thought it would… including from me, sadly. At the beginning of the film, there were stupid bastards laughing at everything on the screen, like they were FORCING themselves to laugh at this low-brow humor. For some reason this always annoys me – maybe they’re warming up their laugh muscles for when it ACTUALLY is funny. I’ll laugh if it’s funny, but I won’t laugh just because I paid money to be entertained. About half an hour in and I found myself laughing as well. I guess I’m a stupid bastard now. Sigh…
[Side note here: I wondered if my theater ran some sort of special night for whores on Thursdays, but it turns out it was just the opening night for Sex in the City. I still don’t understand why ladies would tramp themselves up for this premier – it’s a safe bet any guy in the theater in line for SITC isn’t going to be interested in a female in the first place, right? Just sayin…]
MacGruber’s wife has been killed at the altar by Dieter Von Kunth (and yes, they say his last name as many times as humanly possible in this film). Kunth is played by who I initially thought, “Wow, Brad Pitt has really let himself go.” Sadly, Kunth is actually played by Val Kilmer, who has also let himself go – but I’ll be honest, is still a good looking guy that makes me miss Willow. Kunth is now an arms dealer and has gotten his hands on a nuclear missile and plans to blow up Washington DC. The US military has asked MacGruber, the world’s top special ops killer, to take down Kunth and get his final revenge.
MacGruber resists at first, but eventually caves and assembles a team of top thugs and then proceeds to accidentally blow them all up. The brass try to pull him off the case but MacGruber sets up another team, including Ryan Phillippe and Kristen Wiig, to go after Kunth. MacGruber isn’t the awesome fighter/mastermind people assume him to be, but he’s got a pretty high opinion of himself, which is hilarious/pathetic at times.
Then… there are the love-making scenes. I’m convinced they were written by the writers of Family Guy, since they went on just long enough to make you uncomfortable and then annoyed, and then it comes around back to being funny again and finally stops. MacGruber has sex with Wiig and then out of guilt goes back to his dead wife’s grave and then has sex with his dead wife’s ghost. It’s ridiculous, but again, somehow ends up being enough to get a laugh.
The funny part for me is that MacGruber doesn’t use guns (but only because he doesn’t know how). He does the MacGyver thing and makes things out of bubblegum and tennis balls that never work, and he also has his patented move – the throat rip. He grabs bad guys’ throats and then rips out their windpipe. It’s hilariously gruesome and I love it.
The movie is filled with all kinds of slapstick prop humor (like shoving celery up their asses) and dressing Wiig up like MacGruber in one scene (where she flips out in a coffee shop and it actually IS funny) and then dresses her (poorly) as one of the criminals. At one point, he ends up using Phillippe as a human shield for a long period of time and somehow it is much funnier than you’d expect. But the film is also filled with occasional brilliant writing. The acting is supposed to make you uncomfortable and isn’t supposed to be good. Plus, Chris Jericho (whom I used to be mistaken for when he had hair) is in the film, so you know it’s quality casting, right? It helps that there are a handful of other wrestlers in the film – no wait, it doesn’t help.
So, despite it being a 90-minute SNL skit, it still ended up getting more laughs than I thought it would… including from me, sadly. At the beginning of the film, there were stupid bastards laughing at everything on the screen, like they were FORCING themselves to laugh at this low-brow humor. For some reason this always annoys me – maybe they’re warming up their laugh muscles for when it ACTUALLY is funny. I’ll laugh if it’s funny, but I won’t laugh just because I paid money to be entertained. About half an hour in and I found myself laughing as well. I guess I’m a stupid bastard now. Sigh…
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Moon
I wasn’t sure what to expect from this film. I knew it was kind of a space-themed movie, but I wasn’t sure if it was like Aliens or like Event Horizon (my favorite movie of the space-genre). Did it have monsters? Suspense? Lasers? Explosions? Flash-frozen humans that shatter? It doesn’t have any of those things, actually, yet, it’s a decent film.
Moon is set in the not-too-distant future where a company had developed a way to mine energy from the radiation found in moon rock. The company has set up a base on the moon and has manned it with one guy (Sam Bell) who lives up there for three years at a time. He maintains contact with his bosses with a non-live (or delayed) video/audio feed to his bosses and to his wife and family. He records various messages and sends them back and then watches their video feeds when they arrive. He occupies his time with building a model of a town he used to live in from earth and also working out, reading, and watching old television shows.
On board is a service robot (with the cool monotone voice of Kevin Spacey) named Gertie. Gertie takes care of the operations, listens to Sam talk when he needs to vent, and takes care of medical things. It’s a very efficient system. Sam has to go out to one of the giant mining machines to collect the energy capsule and while he’s out there driving on the moon, he crashes his rover into the mining machine. Sam wakes up in the infirmary with Gertie tending him and telling him he’s had an accident while checking on the mining machine. Then things start to get weird. Weird and depressing.
This movie doesn’t have a lot of action in it. I’m pretty sure that’s the point of it all. It’s about a guy stuck on the moon for three years at a time and trying not to go crazy in the meantime. It’s supposed to be long and drawn out and depressing and gloomy and sterile. The more Sam Bell finds out about why he’s here on the moon base, the more he realizes how expendable he is to the company that employs him. I don’t think there’s a moral or a point to this movie, but it was well done and well acted. There aren’t a lot of characters in this movie, so I think once they found one that worked (Sam Rockwell), they just had him do everything. The film is worth seeing, but I realized I was more depressed than I thought afterwards and didn’t talk for like 4 hours. Weird.
Moon is set in the not-too-distant future where a company had developed a way to mine energy from the radiation found in moon rock. The company has set up a base on the moon and has manned it with one guy (Sam Bell) who lives up there for three years at a time. He maintains contact with his bosses with a non-live (or delayed) video/audio feed to his bosses and to his wife and family. He records various messages and sends them back and then watches their video feeds when they arrive. He occupies his time with building a model of a town he used to live in from earth and also working out, reading, and watching old television shows.
On board is a service robot (with the cool monotone voice of Kevin Spacey) named Gertie. Gertie takes care of the operations, listens to Sam talk when he needs to vent, and takes care of medical things. It’s a very efficient system. Sam has to go out to one of the giant mining machines to collect the energy capsule and while he’s out there driving on the moon, he crashes his rover into the mining machine. Sam wakes up in the infirmary with Gertie tending him and telling him he’s had an accident while checking on the mining machine. Then things start to get weird. Weird and depressing.
This movie doesn’t have a lot of action in it. I’m pretty sure that’s the point of it all. It’s about a guy stuck on the moon for three years at a time and trying not to go crazy in the meantime. It’s supposed to be long and drawn out and depressing and gloomy and sterile. The more Sam Bell finds out about why he’s here on the moon base, the more he realizes how expendable he is to the company that employs him. I don’t think there’s a moral or a point to this movie, but it was well done and well acted. There aren’t a lot of characters in this movie, so I think once they found one that worked (Sam Rockwell), they just had him do everything. The film is worth seeing, but I realized I was more depressed than I thought afterwards and didn’t talk for like 4 hours. Weird.
The Losers
The first time I saw a preview for this, I thought I wanted to see it. Then the more reviews I read about this film, the less I wanted to see it. The previews made this seem like an awesome film – so mission accomplished trailer-people. Sadly, the rest-of-the-movie people didn’t come through. When I read it was a bad adaptation of the A-Team, I was intrigued. Sadly, those reviews were pretty spot on.
The film is about a group of military special ops people sent into the rain forest of Bolivia to take out a drug dealer. However, the dealer has a handful of kids on site to make sure they don’t get attacked. The commandos roll into the drug operation, shoot up the bad guys and rescue the kids before an air strike is called in to blow up the whole thing. The special ops people are presumed dead and are given dishonorable everything so their country thinks they had turned into bad guys at the end.
The good guys find some sort of sponsor who is willing to fund a mission to track down and find the person responsible for the blowing up of the children and loss of the teams American identities. They sign on and sneak back into the country with a ton of money and a bunch of guns. The bad guy is a major arms dealer who is building these things called Snukes – or super nukes. These weapons, with the help of some awful CGI, make whole island disappear in the ocean. The bad guy is selling them to the highest bidder and has no problem killing people who get in his way. The “B-Team” ends up finding him and there are all kinds of glass and explosion-filled shootouts.
Where to start…? The acting in this movie is absolutely wretched. Thankfully, I was one of two people in the theater when I saw it (that should tell you something), so we were able to get quite vocal during the film. Lot’s of “COME ON!” and “REALLY!?” and “That doesn’t happen!” happened during this film. What’s worse the the direct tie to the A-Team is the fact that it has an even closer tie to Tropic Thunder. Every character in The Losers has a counterpart in Tropic Thunder. Sad but true. So I found myself thinking of Robert Downey Jr and Ben Stiller way too many times. There was some sort of weak tie to a graphic novel or comic book shoutout in the opening and closing credits, but nothing about the film reminded me of comics at any point. Seemed like a waste if that's what they were going for.
Save yourself the time and money by not seeing this film. It had one good line that I remembered from the preview. That’s one of the few times I laughed – at least when I was supposed to laugh. I laughed at quite a few things the producers of this film didn’t intend. Terrible film.
The film is about a group of military special ops people sent into the rain forest of Bolivia to take out a drug dealer. However, the dealer has a handful of kids on site to make sure they don’t get attacked. The commandos roll into the drug operation, shoot up the bad guys and rescue the kids before an air strike is called in to blow up the whole thing. The special ops people are presumed dead and are given dishonorable everything so their country thinks they had turned into bad guys at the end.
The good guys find some sort of sponsor who is willing to fund a mission to track down and find the person responsible for the blowing up of the children and loss of the teams American identities. They sign on and sneak back into the country with a ton of money and a bunch of guns. The bad guy is a major arms dealer who is building these things called Snukes – or super nukes. These weapons, with the help of some awful CGI, make whole island disappear in the ocean. The bad guy is selling them to the highest bidder and has no problem killing people who get in his way. The “B-Team” ends up finding him and there are all kinds of glass and explosion-filled shootouts.
Where to start…? The acting in this movie is absolutely wretched. Thankfully, I was one of two people in the theater when I saw it (that should tell you something), so we were able to get quite vocal during the film. Lot’s of “COME ON!” and “REALLY!?” and “That doesn’t happen!” happened during this film. What’s worse the the direct tie to the A-Team is the fact that it has an even closer tie to Tropic Thunder. Every character in The Losers has a counterpart in Tropic Thunder. Sad but true. So I found myself thinking of Robert Downey Jr and Ben Stiller way too many times. There was some sort of weak tie to a graphic novel or comic book shoutout in the opening and closing credits, but nothing about the film reminded me of comics at any point. Seemed like a waste if that's what they were going for.
Save yourself the time and money by not seeing this film. It had one good line that I remembered from the preview. That’s one of the few times I laughed – at least when I was supposed to laugh. I laughed at quite a few things the producers of this film didn’t intend. Terrible film.
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