Fury Review Part 2
From the first trailer I knew I was going to love Fury. You see I am what wargammers call a treadhead. I love tanks and always have. On the rare occasion that I travel if there is a tank museum anywhere around I will always try to visit it. The addition of a tank of any kind will automatically make a movie better. The Bridges of Madison County would have been an amazing film if Clint Eastwood had driven around in an M60 Patton. Here is a list off the top of my head of movies that rocked because they had tanks in them: Tank, the Beast (amazing movie BTW), Time Bandits, Tank Girl, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, A Bridge Too Far, and Patton. Some of these films sucked, but the tank made them better. So naturally I was inclined to love a film about a tank crew.
I was extremely gratified to see that David Ayers either knows a thing or two about tanks or he did some research because he accurately showed how good American tanks were in WWII and that is they were crap on a stick. American tanks sucked back then and we made up for that failure by just making over 50,000 of them. Kind of hard on the crews but we really didn’t have a choice. 
This film accurately showed what would happen if a Tiger I (the Hulk of WWII tanks. Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger Ausf.E. Image courtesy of the Hulk t shirt category) encountered four M4 Shermans: the Tiger kicked seven kinds of ass on the Shermans and only by being very lucky was Fury able to beat it. I was also thrilled to see they actually got a hold of the last working Tiger tank in the world and used it for the film. That kind of tread accuracy does my heart good.
This film was also great in showing what it would be like to be a crewman in a tank in battle. The accurately captured the claustrophobia and terror. The action scenes were great. During the many battle scenes I experienced the rarest gift a film can give an audience member: excitement. I was actively gripping my armrests after watching the tanks in action knowing that any one of them could blow up at any time. The action was also horrific and gruesome. If watching men burn alive in battle isn’t your thing this might not work for you.
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Fury Review Part 3
I also have to say I loved the cast and their characters. Even Shia LaBouf didn’t put me off my feed and that is saying a lot. 
Of course having Jon Bernthal from the Walking Dead is worth Shia at his worst (and honestly he wasn’t bad. Image courtesy of the Walking Dead t shirt category). David Ayers has done many movies involving the simple yet complex dynamic of men and their relationships with each other. Films like Training Day and End of Watch really explored how men interact with each other in all their testosterone glory. This film explores that to the nth degree with the crew of Fury both loving and hating each other. You can’t spend months in the same metal can with five other men without some conflict and you can’t survive that long without developing a true bond of brotherhood. The introduction of the new recruit mixes that dynamic up a lot and the story digs into it in a very pleasing way.
On the other hand David Ayers did not exactly strain his brain writing this story. It boils down to the tank gets a new crewman who sucks and no one trusts and then drives around Germany shooting Nazis. I’m not kidding when I say that’s it. There was some character development (mostly for the new recruit) but the idea of a story arc and/or three acts is foreign to David. However when you do look at his other movies you realize that is kind of his signature style. End of Watch was almost a vignette documentary and even Training Day moved from set piece to set piece like chapters in a book. I don’t think this movie really need a lot more but at least on paper it was lazy.
The other lazy part was the fact that David must have gotten a book on WWII character cliches and checked off the first half dozen from the first page. For simplicities sake I am going to name them after Saving Private Ryan counterparts. There is the grizzled but combat fatigued commander dedicated to the safety of his men with a mysterious past and education beyond his station (Captain Miller). There is the new recruit who no one trusts and manages to get some of his comrades killed (Corporal Upham. BTW I don’t want to harp on this but the Fury guy was a clerical typist and in Ryan Upham wanted to bring his typewriter). There is the loudmouthed troublemaker (Private Reiben). There is the religious gunner (Private Jackson). Then there is the token minority (this one no direct Ryan connection although he was kind of the group conscious so I’d match him with Private Mellish). It was almost laughable but there is a reason stereotypes actually work. In other words, sure these characters were grossly borrowed from other sources but they really worked.
Oh, yeah. Like I said before the action was brutal and if you have a problem with the idea of American soldiers not always acting like the paragons of virtue we like to pretend they are this movie might throw you off. There is the execution of prisoners, fighting between soldiers, engagement of prostitutes, and a scene of romance that in a different light could have been construed as rape and definitely misogynist. Also children used as soldiers. You have been warned.
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Fury Review Part 4
For all that I thought the movie was awesome. In a business that claims to want to generate excitement but then produces nothing but the blandest crap ever this movie was exciting. You get engaged with all the characters with a minimum of exposition and feel hurt when something bad happens to them. The action was adrenaline pumping for sure. The Nazis were evil, the Americans mostly good, and best of all the film had tanks in it. Win win win.
Brief story recap. Sgt. Collier “Wardaddy” (Brad Pitt) and his crew gunner “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf), driver “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Peña), and loader “Coon-Ass” Travis (Jon Bernthal) get back from a battle and have a new recruit Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) assigned to them as their new bow gunner (the last one having died). They are given a mission to go help some guys against the Germans and Norman screws up, getting another tank killed. Wardaddy tries to toughen up him up and eventually has him hooked up with a local girl. They get sent somewhere else and an epic battle ensues. Most of the world blows up.
Worth seeing? Absolutely. The only issue I really had was the blatant use of stereotypes for all the characters and that is more upon reflection. During the movie I thought they were all cool. 
You don’t have to love tanks to love this film but if you do you will be in pig heaven (in a tank. World of Tanks image from our video game t shirt category). Pacing was great, filming amazing, action awesome, and the characters well worth your time. I’d say definitely not a date movie especially if your date is the type to focus on one little thing (like humans burning alive) and they bitch about it all night. Guys film for sure. Bathroom break? Honestly I’d hold it. It is 134 minutes so it might be a bit of a strain. If you can’t go that long I’d say the dinner scene is the most disposable but even that one is good. Try to hurry. Final rating? 4.5 out of 5 Phasers.
4.5 of 5! Great!
Thanks for reading.
the Infamous Dave Inman
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Gone Girl Review Part 1
Good but not as great as everyone else seems to be going on about.
mi·sog·y·ny (məˈsäjənē) noun – dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.
mi·sog·a·my (məˈsäɡəmē) noun – the hatred of marriage.
I’m starting my review with these two definitions due to the fact that if you have ever been on the fence about being either a misogynist or misogamist this film will push you over into the miso yard. If you have ever had a reason to distrust a woman, your wife, or the idea of marriage but are trying to get over it do not see this film. You will walk out seriously distrusting your wife, your mother, your female friends and relatives, the girl who serves you coffee at Starbucks, and any mammal lacking a Y chromosome (and possibly certain female birds and reptiles).
Not to say it’s a bad movie. It’s actually quite good. Compelling story, fun twists, great characters, excellent acting, very good pacing, and overall a truly flowing story. It even has a couple of very positive female characters in the sister and the cop. It is by David Fincher, director of my all time favorite film Fight Club and as such I would expect it to be at the very least masterful and it is. 
Of course the only female character in Fight Club is a sex crazed borderline personality ball busting kleptomaniac so it seems clear that Mr. Fincher has never planned on building his career through the uplifting of the female stereotype. (I did feel the need to show a better female stereotype so I pulled this image from the Wonder Woman t shirt category)
However to see a positive role model male or female is not why you go see a David Fincher film. He is the master of the flawed protagonist and this film definitely falls into that slot. Therefore it is not the issue I have with the film. The problem I can’t seem to get past is the fact that at one point about 3/4 of the way through the 149 minutes of the film a scene that was supposed to be both horrific and pivotal had most of the audience (including myself) laughing uproariously and the suspension of disbelief, which had been hovering nicely at the 12-14 ft mark, shot up to the upper stratosphere and left us all gasping for oxygen. The last 1/4 of the film stopped being a gritty and realistic crime drama and turned into a fantasy with comedic overtones that were really hard to take seriously.
I will be dropping spoilers shortly and will most definitely give you warnings ahead of time but for a minute I want to talk about plot holes. A plot hole is like a pot hole; some are bigger than others and some streets might have one or two or be covered with them like a teenager with acne. Sometimes you can drive past them or even swerve to avoid one that you see coming. Sometimes they are small enough that you drive right over them with just a little bump and sometimes there are so many packed together that the street is more pot hole then asphalt and you can move along at a slow pace with a steady vibration through your seat.
Sometimes, however, you can be driving along a perfectly smooth street with no sign of anything and all of a sudden hit a gigantic pot hole that bottoms out your car and bends your axle, leaving you driving along listening to the sound of your tire rub against the side of your wheel well. That’s what happened for me. Smooth ride for almost two hours and then bang! Gigantic plot hole (see what I did there?).
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Gone Girl Review Part 2
SPOILER ALERT (if you want to miss them skip ahead to Part 3) Plot holes aside (I actually spotted two) the movie is brilliant from a technical point of view and the first half will draw you in like a tiger pit baited with bacon. The first half is the gritty crime drama that has everyone doing things as smart as possible and are dealing with a near criminal genius. The husband manages to make some boneheaded mistakes but it’s the same kind of mistakes anyone would make in a difficult circumstances. The wife has her dark plot going (that’s the spoiler. I hope you headed my warning) and the lady cop is super smart and doesn’t miss anything. In fact during the set up and dark reveal the plot is nigh flawless and intriguing.
Then the wife starts making some boneheaded mistakes starting with making friends with white trash losers. Her carefully constructed plot unravels and she has to improvise. She makes a huge raft of errors (this is where that one big and one sort of big plot hole crops up) but somehow everyone else gets stupider. The female cop, who until then was hard driven to find the truth and a Sherlockian genius in spotting clues, turns stupid and helpless. The husband, who given the same set of circumstances any normal human would have immediately denounced his wife and run screaming into the night rather than spend ten minutes alone with her, bites his tongue long enough for her to implement her next dark plot. The film transforms into a cool innovative movie with amazing potential to another lazy Hollywood script counting on deus ex machina and a complete disregard for character motivation to move the plot along.
What were the two big plot holes I spotted? Well, we are well into the spoiler zone so I assume you are OK with me dropping them. So the wife calls up her old high school boyfriend Doogie Howser (Niel Patrick Harris but his character name is Dezi) in order to have some resources and eventually graphically cuts his throat 
(this is the pivotal scene that had the whole audience laughing ant the exact moment that the film turned into a dark comedy. The Halloween image I pulled from the horror movie t shirt collection), claiming he kidnapped her the day she disappeared and kept her as a sex slave and rape victim. However she meets up with him weeks after her disappearance in a casino (well known for video cameras). So the police made no effort to track Doogies movements? She later uses the cameras at his lake shore mansion to make it look like he raped her but there would also have been footage of her arriving happily with him weeks after her supposed disappearance. A couple hours worth of police work would have uncovered that but no one seemed interesting in investigating the death of a wealthy person with no prior record, especially when she flubbed badly in her interrogation.
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Gone Girl Review Part 3
In spite of those issues the film was definitely several steps above the usual dross foisted upon us by Hollywood, most of whom seem to think we are mouth breathing cow people who are content to chew on whatever cud they send our way. Here is a brief, spoiler free recap:
Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is a cruddy husband who comes home to find his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) missing under suspicious circumstances. She is a minor celebrity and a media storm rapidly builds around her disappearance. A tough police investigator (Kim Dickens) leads the investigation and as it progresses suspicion shifts towards Nick and his sister Margo (Carrie Coon). Plot points and twists are revealed and things get freaky as they often do in David Fincher movies.
So worth seeing? Absolutely yes, if only to help educate the rest of Hollywood as to what we the American audiences really want. Story was good for the bulk of the film, acting was great (especially Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck. I also really liked Tyler Perry), camera and film work extremely well done, pacing kind of brilliant in the sense that Mr. Fincher wanted to build a story rather than just present one, and overall a great movie going experience. 
I just don’t think it’s worthy of the tongue bath adulation that most people seem desperate to lather it with. It’s a decent flick swimming in a sea of mediocrity. It’s not the second coming of the Godfather with a script written on paper pulped from a piece of the True Cross (Godfather image courtesy of the movie t shirt category). Go see it and if you can turn off some of your higher brain functions you will love it. Personally I think it would be a better movie if you actually left before it takes it’s left turn into Mundania. At 149 minutes you could cut out 25 minutes early and still feel like you got a quality movie experience. 4 out of 5 Phasers.
The Infamous Dave Inman
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Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 22 Space Seed
This episode holds a very special place in my heart if only because it launched the best Star Trek movie the Wrath of Khan (Maybe I will marry TWOK! Shut up!). Even without the amazing movie following it up this would be one of the best episodes. Kirk is outclassed in every way by Khan physically, mentally, and sexually (yes, one episode where another stellar sexual magnet out sexy’s the Captain. Good thing they filmed this in Season 1 or Shatner never would have let that slide) and like in TWOK the only way Kirk can beat Khan is with his greater experience in the Enterprise and later in starship combat.
The base premise is cool although somewhat flawed. It made a lot of sense in the 70s to breed super men but honestly these days can you really imagine making a super human that would be able to out perform what we all know what machines will eventually be capable of doing? However I liked the idea of a crew of super beings running around conquering the universe. Too bad in Trek Into Darkness they didn’t thaw out the rest of the Botany Bay crew. I guess they were afraid to make the movie too interesting.
Anyway, awesome episode one well worth our love and admiration. The image I grabbed from our collection of Superman t shirts BTW.
the Infamous Dave Inman
Dracula Untold Review Part 1
Some stories don’t really need telling.
Astute readers of this blog might have noticed that I have backed off on the really long blogs and am opting for shorter, more to the point diatribes. The fact is with the hours a day I spend buying hot sports cars and kissing pretty ladies on the mouth I have less time than ever before for blogging. I was also given a refresher by my SEO people about how shorter blogs are both read more frequently and have more impact with the ultimate gatekeeper of the internet, Google. Therefore I have been trying to do more posts but shorter. Quality over quantity.
That being said my one true love in blogging will always be writing movie reviews so I will try to keep on doing so, albeit less often. I do also enjoy coming up with fun lists and beating up on certain TV shows I feel have somehow betrayed me so you will see a lot of that, but for the reviews I will have to be more selective. I am also going to often break them up into smaller chunks but will include handy “next” buttons so you can follow along. For reasons I don’t want to get into too much this really helps me out.
So Dracula Untold. Honestly it wasn’t horrible. Certainly better than I, Frankenstein. It also is a movie about vampires that almost manages to get through it completely without romanticizing the crap out of them. The vampires do not sparkle, nor do they debate the morality of eating people. Of the classic story remakes it is probably the best thus far. Of course when you realize you are comparing it to the likes of Hansel & Gretel, Jack the Giant Slayer, Snow White and the Huntsman, and the Legend of Oz: Dorothy’s Return you realize it is the man who skipped breakfast competing in a hot dog eating contest against a group who crushed a breakfast buffet.
But the thing is in my reviews not horrible is not the same as good, and Dracula Untold is not good. The story has gaping plot holes right at the water line, the dialog was retro 70’s Batman TV show bad without the comedy
(I found this Batman hoodie in the big comic book t shirt category), the uber PC attempt to make the Turkish invaders not look Muslim reeked of white guilt, the protagonist was ridiculously out of the league with his antagonists (anyone else like watching baby seals get clubbed? It was about that bad), the action was some of the worst ever with everything devolving into a blur of arms, swords, and bats, the struggle and gravitas implied in the trailers was conspicuously missing, and the entirety of this action/horror film was under 10 fathoms of murky PG-13 water with a cinder block tied to its feet.
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Dracula Untold Review Part 2
The PG-13 action was particularly galling. Somehow Hollywood has come to the conclusion that if they mash all the action into an incomprehensible scrum of quick cuts and uber dense CGI shots we the audience might not notice that no one seems to be bleeding or losing significant anatomy. The veins of every casualty in this film could have been filled with Kool Aid as far as I could tell and on the rare occasion they were forced to show blood (you know, that pesky vampire drinking thing) it looks like the props guy ran down to the nearest Napa Auto Parts as it all had the consistency and color of 10/40 motor oil. Black and viscous. All this to cater to the kiddie winks. 
Let me clue you parents in on something. Your kids have no business being at a movie about Dracula or anyone who’s nickname is “the Impaler”. In fact I think your kids should be at home watching Barney videos until the day they turn 18 and then join the army (either that or locked in the Skinner box of your choice. Thanks, dad. Dracula image courtesy of the horror movie t shirt collection).
The plot holes were numerous and annoying. So the dark, head vampire is trapped in a cave at the top of Broken Tooth mountain and can never leave, yet somehow managed to sustain himself on human blood for centuries and decorate his home in a skull and broken bone motif like he found the legendary Ikea “Desecrated Corpse” collection. Um, how did he get all those fools up to his dark and foreboding man hole? Vlad had to literally free climb a cliff but the vamp ate a battalion of Turkish scouts the week before. Was there an escalator on the other side of the mountain with a sign adverting great hot wings Vlad didn’t know about? So the vamp is trapped in the cave until he finds some sucker to take on his “curse” of immortality, super speed, super strength, and the ability to transform into a swarm of bats (um, can someone email the definition of the word curse to the writers please). Gee, how about the hundreds of skulls you have been playing bocce ball with for centuries? Surely one of them at one time was inside the head of a living human who might be willing to live forever, freeing you of your imprisonment.
Incidentally, do you know how long it takes to mobilize a medieval army of 100,000 men and march them from Turkey to Transylvania? If so can you write Legendary Pictures and tell them because they seem to think it can be done in three days. Also if you are doing a historical movie about the Turkish army it is OK to have them look Turkish, not like a Aryan Army rally. They are so afraid of offending the Turks (and by extension the Muslims) that most of the Turkish cast looked like they rounded up a collection of A&F models. The film also couldn’t seem to decide on an accent for any part of the late 14th century subjecting us to American, British, Russian, very indeterminate Arabic, and at one point I swear German. The casting director clearly just wanted accents and didn’t care what kind. I wish someone who spoke fluent Klingon had applied.
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Dracula Untold Review Part 3
And of course, the torture of Vlad having to suffer from awful temptation, eventually giving in to his thirst and thus falling from grace? Remember that part that was grossly implied might be significant in the trailers and for about 10 minutes in the movie? Well, somehow he only feels the thirst when he is with his wife, not when he is out on the battlefield literally killing 1,000 men and surely covered from head to toe with blood. Did not a drop hit his lips? Then, because there is no way a major protagonist could ever be a truly bad guy he has to suck the blood of his wife after she freely offers it him in order to save his country. Oh, thank god. We were a stones throw away from seeing a character make a morally ambiguous choice there. I was in danger of actually being interested for a moment, but the writers managed to prevent the audience from falling into that hole by filling it with safe, innocuous BBQ flavored styrofoam packing peanuts. Bon appetit!
My final issue is the fact that in the first half of the film Vlad manages to kill 1,000 Turkish soldiers by himself. At that point he fell into the Superman trap in that he was so powerful his ability to fight got boring. There is no struggle to be had unless someone manages to find some Kryptonite (or in this case silver) and like I have said about Superman and Kryptonite, if Dracula is faced with someone who has covered a 20 foot circle with silver coins why doesn’t he just stand 30 feet away and throw a 50lb boulder? 
(Or in Supermans case a few miles away and burn Lex Luthors arms and legs off with heat vision? Heat vision image courtesy of the comic book t shirts category) When nothing short of deus ex machina will slow down your hero he gets really boring. Also how is it Vlad has to look at obscure texts to learn about vampires but everyone else seems to have taken a college level course on it and written their doctoral thesis on ways to kill vampires?
Anyway, a brief recap. The Sultan of Turkey wants Vlad the Impalers son and 1,000 other Transylvanian boys to be his slave soldiers and Vlad has to ask the local vampire for the power to stop him. If Vlad can not drink blood for three days he wins his mortality back (um, is that really winning?) but naturally runs out of time and has to suck his wife dry. Bad PG-13 action ensues and somehow this film managed to throw out a fishhook baited to catch a sequel.
For all my complaints it wasn’t painfully bad. Luke Evans did the best he could with the lines he was given and there was a story. Pacing was good and appropriate for the story and the old vampire scene was pretty cool. Dracula did not ever glow in daylight and most of the vampires looked pretty gross. If the area of classic story/fairy tale reboots could be considered the Dachshund races of movie making as compared to the real dog track of practically every other movie type out there then this film would definitely be the fastest Wiener dog. Of course the issue of vampires being romanticized was pleasantly ignored for the first 87 minutes of the film only to rear it’s very ugly head in the last 5 when the producers dug deep into our pockets for sequel money but still. Not horrible.
So worth seeing? Sure, why not? It’s stupidly entertaining (like most modern movies to be perfectly honest). The only way you will feel ripped off is if you think you are going to see a horror film. This is a medieval super hero action film that borders on fan fiction as written by sweaty teenage girls. There is no horror to be had here. I think this movie is safe enough for a date as long as she doesn’t want to have her IQ challenged (or half her IQ challenged). Nothing will be gained from having watched this film, but on the other hand nothing will have been lost.
the Infamous Dave Inman
@NerdKungFu
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